The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “So long, fella.”

  “So long, Bark. See you in six weeks.”

  “Right.”

  The sound of a loose strand on the chains, flailing away methodically under the left rear fender. Damn, I meant to fix that before they left . . . champagne . . . No, Dad, I’m all right. This stuff is harmless . . . talk . . . champagne . . . now what did I say? . . . more champagne . . . (and suppose I should tell you, my dear lady, that my best friend just married a woman who was probably an idiot less than a year ago? How would you react to that, I wonder?) . . . just one more, Thomas. I can take care of myself. . . . Sure, I’m going up right now . . . just a little drunk, that’s all . . . hold still, Thomas, and we’ll get into these pajamas okay . . . God, what a night outside! Moon on the snow . . . Happy the groom the moon shines on . . . My God, that stuff makes the room go round. That’s Orion, that big constellation . . . I remember . . . damn all memories. . . .

  11. EVENTS LEADING UP TO A TELEGRAM

  I DEVOTED the next couple of weeks to pulling myself together. It was high time. I’d been drinking so much that my hand trembled every time I picked up a glass, and several mornings I had to go to a barbershop rather than risk shaving myself. Work was beginning to pile up at the office, and somehow or other I got through it. Actually I was glad to be busy because it kept me from thinking or feeling lonely, and I did so well in a couple of cases that they gave me a raise in salary. In some respects, life was very satisfactory.

  On the other side of the ledger was the fact that there was at this time what amounted to an estrangement between Dr. Lister and me. The way I had behaved before and after the wedding (and I was very drunk indeed—Thomas informed me afterward I said things that all present would remember for years) was unpardonable. Dr. Lister told me frankly that he was ashamed of me and that he found it hard to forgive my conduct.

  The result was that I found myself more alone than ever before in my life and for ten days I could not get adjusted to it. Coming home each evening to an empty apartment with the prospect of long hours by myself had a depressing effect on my morale, and there was the constant struggle to stay away from the Scotch.

  Often I wondered if I had acquired some sort of obsession about Selena and her marrying Jerry. There seemed something unbalanced about the distrust of her that I felt whenever I thought about her. After all, there was little cause for my feeling except that LeNormand’s death was an ugly thing, and it was out of that horror that she and Jerry had met and not-so-ultimately married. The fate that had overtaken LeNormand, whatever its cause, was not a thing I could contemplate quietly as a possibility for Jerry, and there were too many unresolved mysteries about Selena and her first husband’s death to please me. Maybe the Italians can live happily on the slopes of Vesuvius, but I am not that sort of person.

  While Jerry and Selena were still away on their wedding trip I rented a two-room apartment for myself farther uptown. For a time, at least, they planned to live in our old place, and I spent a good deal of time down there getting it ready for their return. I resolved that it would be in impeccable order when they got back to it, and believe me, it was. New paper on every closet shelf, everything put away in the proper place, wedding presents all unpacked and arranged, even the pictures hung for them. I put my Marin over the fireplace, where it looked very well indeed. Uncle Horatio’s lithograph of the Good Shepherd—a grisly sort of thing—hung in the foyer where it would, if necessary, soften up bill collectors and help speed the parting guest.

  I must admit that there was an element of selfishness in all this. I wanted Selena, in particular, to be in my debt; it gave me a sensation of nobility to bury my personal feelings and think of her and Jerry’s pleasure and comfort. The whole performance was a piece of self-dramatization, but they got the benefit of it and it was harmless.

  So far I haven’t mentioned the letter I had from Jerry. It was as reserved and noncommittal as all his letters, but I could read between the lines that he was happy: “The weather here has been warm and sunny almost all the time. You ought to see the moonlight nights we have.” And more of the same. He mentioned Selena only once. “I know you are going to like her when you know her better. She says to send you her regards.” Well, that was as might be. At any rate, it was rather a pointless letter except for a postscript: “P.S. Have you heard anything more from Parsons? I suppose he hasn’t made any progress? There’s not much American news in the paper down here.”

  So far as I knew he hadn’t reached any solution. I hadn’t seen him again myself, but Dr. Lister went down one day to New Zion. On the way home he dropped in at my new apartment—one cold February evening it was—and we had a drink together. He told me where he had been.

  “Did Parsons have anything new to contribute?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t believe he knows any more now than when he started on the case.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. Offhand I could think of one discovery of his, Luella Jamison. Of course, that had nothing to do with the case. But the coincidences were curious.

  I decided to fish around. I wanted to find out whether Parsons had mentioned anything about Luella to Dr. Lister. “What is he working on now?” I asked.

  “That I don’t know.” He went on, a little embarrassedly, I thought. “When this engagement of Jerry’s first came up, I wrote Parsons.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course, I did. I had to make sure that the authorities didn’t believe she was implicated.”

  I nodded.

  “Parsons told me then that he could guess why I was writing to him. He assured me that so far they were fairly positive that Mrs. LeNormand was not implicated. He said that she had a perfect alibi personally, and there was no evidence to show she was an accessory before the fact.” He smiled grimly. “He also remarked that there was no evidence that she was not.”

  “That was just official caution.” “Yes,” he agreed. “So I thought. But I went down to see him today to find out whether anything new had come up that concerned us. I’m pretty well satisfied that it hasn’t.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  He put his fingertips together and stared at them. “I don’t believe the police will solve the LeNormand business.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “It’s unfortunate, in a way. I think we’d all be happier if it were cleared up.”

  Personally I wasn’t so sure about that. It depended on what the truth was. “I guess so,” I replied.

  “You and Jerry haven’t suppressed anything that might come out later?” He sounded apologetic as he asked the question.

  “We haven’t suppressed anything.”

  “Good. I think the wisest thing we can all do is to forget the whole matter until the police have something more to report.”

  “Absolutely.”

  He talked on about small affairs for a while and then he left. I felt unhappy. We had talked together like chance acquaintances.

  The Empress docked on a Wednesday afternoon, and I went down to see her come in and meet the two of them. Dr. Lister had planned to be there too, of course, but an emergency operation came up at the last minute and he could not make it.

  Jerry was looking magnificent, radiating a quiet happiness, and conspicuously proud of his beautiful wife. Selena did not seem much changed to me, and certainly she had lost none of her beauty. People, even in the irritating confusion of the customs, stopped to stare at her, and once a couple of schoolgirls sidled up to ask for her autograph. Apparently they thought anyone as gorgeous as Selena must surely be in the movies. They were plainly disappointed when I told them she was just my friend’s wife and nobody they’d ever heard of. Though after I’d assured them of that I wondered if it was strictly accurate. In fact, one of them did say, “We’re sorry, mister, but my friend and me thought sure we’d seen her in the movies or the papers or someplace.”

  In the taxi going uptown, Jerry presented m
e with a pipe he’d bought in Bermuda, and I was glad to have it. They made me sit between them, and were so cordial and generally sweet, particularly Jerry, that I had a suspicion they’d decided I was a problem child and would have to have special, careful treatment. But all in all, things passed on pleasantly and I left them at the door of their place feeling glad that I had arranged it so perfectly for them. All they had to do was walk in and begin living in it. I’d even started the milkman to coming again.

  The months that followed were good ones. Jerry must have told his family how decent I had been about the apartment. They began to look at me again as if I was human, and best of all, Dad and I returned to the old intimacy that meant so much to both of us. I went out to Long Island many times, and often when Jerry and Selena were not there. On such occasions Dad and I did not discuss them. We had an unspoken agreement about that.

  I had hoped to grow to like Selena as I came to know her better. But it just didn’t happen, though I learned to admire her in certain ways. She had a quiet self-control that made any open break impossible, and an almost unbelievable modesty about her beauty. A very rare quality in my experience. As time went on, I found it easier to be with her because I finally discarded Parsons’ thought that she might be Luella Jamison. She knew too much, her mind was too clear and logical, she was too full of information about the most abstract subjects ever to have been an idiot. Watching her, I came to the conclusion that she had had a long and exceedingly thorough education. That alone could account for the way she could talk to Jerry and Dr. Lister about astronomy, or mathematics, or archaeology. It might, too, account for her almost gauche insensitivity to the prejudices and peculiarities of the people around her. Wherever she came from, she had been educated in an atmosphere of objective intellectuality, and her interests molded in ways unlike those of most other women. Then I would remember the way she danced, and not be so sure.

  When she was out at the house, she spent a lot of time in the library, reading every conceivable sort of book. Jerry and I would urge her to go driving with us, or play ping-pong in the basement, or occasionally, on a fair day, go out on the Sound in our sloop. She seldom came along, but when she did she was equal to the occasion. I remember one blustery March morning when we were out on the water and she was taking her turn at the tiller. A cold, shouting wind was coming down the Sound, and the sloop keeled under it till the cockpit coaming was all but awash. Selena sat there with the wind blowing her hair and whipping color into her face, calmly watching the level of the water racing along the lee deck. At the instant when I’d decided that we’d be wet the next second, she eased off the helm and the wash retreated from the coaming. She never batted an eye. That proved to me that she had courage and steady nerves. But I was glad to take my turn at the tiller. I like to play things with a margin of safety.

  That side of her was, if anything, admirable, but beyond admiring her, there was nothing else you could do with Selena. She had somehow never learned the little easy give-and-take that lubricates every agreeable human relationship. She could talk well on many subjects, but she never seemed able to converse, and it is conversation liberally sprinkled with badinage that I enjoy. When she spoke she never made an allusion; she never reminisced, she never said anything silly. Every sentence was a statement or a question. She seldom laughed, but she did have a silent sense of humor of some sort. At intervals she would give a silent, almost secret smile that told me she was relishing something to herself. I find it hard to recall examples of the quality I am trying to suggest, but I remember one night when we had all been sitting in the library.

  After a time we fell to playing bridge in a desultory sort of way. Grace was out at the house that weekend, and Jerry and I had been playing against Selena and her. Incidentally, Selena was the most astonishing bridge player I ever met. She never seemed to lose an unnecessary trick, and though occasionally a finesse of hers would go wrong, I noticed that when it did she always smiled in that little private way of hers. After an hour or two we got bored, and decided to stop. Grace, who had been keeping score, had no trouble adding up Jerry’s and my side of the ledger, but the entries in the female column were staggering. Grace puckered up her fore head and wrestled with her pencil, muttering to herself, while Jerry and I laughed and told her we conceded the match.

  Suddenly Selena leaned forward, picked the score pad out from under Grace’s nose, glanced at it casually for a moment, and remarked, “Seventeen thousand eight hundred and sixty.”

  Jerry took up the pad after her while Grace simply sat looking astounded and relieved. After a minute or so he said, “That’s right,” with a note of puzzled admiration in his voice. Jerry was exceptionally quick with figures himself, which was why he was such an asset to his firm of statisticians. I think he was piqued by Selena’s speed. “You’re quite a lightning calculator,” he observed. She simply went on smiling lightly and impersonally.

  It was that summer, a few months after the bridge game, that Selena showed me a new side of her character, and one that I was to think of often later on.

  One day, in August if I remember rightly, Jerry was playing in the club tennis tournament. He’d put me out the day before, to my relief, and it was really too hot to do anything. I suggested to Selena, on some impulse or other, that we drive out to Montauk. She agreed readily enough, though I felt that the idea didn’t specially appeal to her.

  For an hour or so we rode in silence. From time to time I glanced at her, sitting coolly and easily in the corner of the seat opposite me. She was immaculate, in a dull blue, severely simple frock and a wide, plain straw hat with a white ribbon around it. Just looking at her made me feel cool, and in a way rested. I felt that there was a truce between us, and resolved firmly to do nothing to violate it.

  After a while, without apparently speaking at me directly, she said, “I think Jerry is very happy.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Why shouldn’t he be?” It was meant to be gallant, of course, but she did not take it that way.

  “You didn’t expect him to be happy after he was married to me.” “Nonsense,” I said, but I thought to myself that it was going to be hard to keep civil if she went on this way. She was an infuriatingly direct woman.

  “On the contrary,” she said, “You are thinking that I am being annoying. I want merely to know whether you have any suggestions.”

  “Suggestions?” I said blankly.

  “You remember how once, before Jerry and I were married, you told me to be good to him?”

  The recollection made me squirm a little, but I had to admit it.

  “So,” she said, “I have tried. Do you think I have succeeded?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  She looked at me through those disturbing violet eyes of hers and said, “You know, I am not accustomed to people like you and Dr. Lister and Jerry. Perhaps sometimes I make mistakes with you.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling that this was getting curiouser and curiouser, “from my point of view, you do. I think you ought to relax a little more.”

  She sighed. “I don’t quite know how to do that.” Her tone of voice suggested that she would look into it in the near future and learn the technique of relaxing.

  “Anyway,” I said, “let’s not talk personalities. You’re you and I’m me, and I guess that’s about all there is to it.”

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled that odd smile of hers.

  “Tell me,” I said, after a pause, “do you like this part of the world?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Why do you ask me that?”

  When I had asked the question, I had been merely making casual conversation, but her reply put a sudden scheme into my head. “Oh, I was just wondering. Some people think California is God’s gift to geography. And I have a cousin who thinks highly of the state of Maine. Everybody has his favorite part of the country.”

  “Long Island is a satisfactory place, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “The no
rth shore, anyway. I like parts of the South, too—the Carolinas and Georgia. Ever been down there?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t believe I should like it. The Southern girls that Jerry knows always seem to me unintelligent, and they have double names like Mary Lou and Sue Ellen. They seem silly to me.”

  “Well, there’s something in that,” I said, adding mentally that she could add a little Southern charm to her own character without loss, and feeling distinctly irritated that I hadn’t trapped her into some sort of admission about her past life and where she came from.

  She looked at me and smiled. “You’re strange, Bark. You ask one question and really want to find out the answer to another one, don’t you?”

  I felt annoyed at her for calling the turn so exactly. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

  “You give it away,” she answered.

  “How?” I asked her.

  “Why,” she said, and paused. “I suppose you’d say that if a person went into a room and shouted something loudly, even if he was all alone in the room, he wouldn’t be keeping what he was saying entirely to himself?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “That’s what you do with your mind, Bark.”

  “You mean you can read my mind?” The idea terrified me and embarrassed me simultaneously.

  She smiled. “Not the way you mean it. But everybody gets some thoughts from the people round them. You know that.”

  “Well,” I began hesitantly.

  “You all talk incompletely,” she went on. “Listen to what people say to each other sometime. The real conversation isn’t wholly in the words. The words are clues to what the person speaking is trying to convey. The rest of it goes direct from one mind to another. You must have noticed that.”