The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

“Well?”

  The voice came from behind me. It was sharply interrogatory, hard, but with something musical in it all the same. I whirled around, feeling like a child detected in naughtiness.

  A woman was standing in the doorway, looking at me without moving. Seeing the bulk of her I wondered how she had managed to come within ten feet of me without making enough sound to attract my attention. She must have weighed all of a hundred and eighty pounds, and her big, loose-coupled body did not look as if it were easy to control.

  I knew at once that this must be the woman about whom the taxi driver had been talking when he asked who “she” was. It was easy to see why she puzzled him and the rest of Barsham Harbor. My first flashing impression was that she looked as if she had once been a queen, and then I recognized that there was something less imperious, perhaps more assertive about her. The two impressions sound mutually exclusive and yet, there was truth in both of them.

  For a moment I stared at her, too surprised to speak. Her obvious force and quality were so startlingly offset by the body that housed them. Apparently she had run to flesh as she grew older—there were heavy slabs of it on her arms, which were bare and soft but not mottled, as the skin of older women who put on weight so often is. Under the lusterless black of her dress her thighs looked tremendous, but her ankles were as thin as a girl’s. Her feet looked almost tiny; I wondered how they managed to carry her bulk. She had the bosom of a retired opera diva. But for all her grossness, she carried herself with strength and purpose; there was no degeneration in that body of hers.

  There was too much powder and rouge on her face. The accented red of her lips, the artificial shadowing under her eyes, the white dusting on nose and chin might not have been so conspicuous in the evening, but in the harsh brightness of this Maine morning streaming through the windows she looked raddled. Like her body, her chin and cheeks had gone to flesh, but under it was the architecture of what must once have been striking beauty, with wide, sharply planed cheekbones and a broad forehead. Her eyes were what remained of that magnificence, dark, so that I could see no bottom to them, and full of splendor. More than anything else about her they accounted for the effect of something regal in her appearance. She was looking at me out of them with the unconscious authority of a woman who does not have to ask for anything, but merely demands or takes it.

  “Well?” she inquired again. The way she said that one word made me eager to explain myself.

  “I beg your pardon,” I began inanely. “I was just opening the shutters to get a little light in here.”

  “I can see what you were doing.”

  “My name is Richard Sayles.” There was no sign that it meant anything to her, so I added, “Julian’s friend.”

  “I have never heard of you.”

  Something about the way she said that made me think twice and decide not to retort in kind. Instead I bowed and pulled Julian’s letter out of my pocket. “He wrote asking me to come at once,” I said firmly.

  She held out her hand for the letter. “He said nothing to me.”

  I did not hand her the letter. “Really,” I told her, “this seems like an unfortunate way for us to meet. I have taken a liberty in walking in on you this way, but I have known Julian a long time.” She said nothing, so I underlined it for her. “I’m afraid I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Mrs. Walters.” Her tone was impatient.

  I bowed again.

  “See here,” she began, “Julian doesn’t want to see anyone. I think you must be mistaken.”

  “Not at all,” I replied, putting the letter back in my pocket. “If you’ll just tell him I’m here, I think he will confirm what I’ve said.”

  Evidently she recognized an impasse when she came to one. “He’s asleep. He was working late last night. I don’t want to wake him.”

  “Please don’t,” I begged her. “There’s no hurry and I’m painfully early, I know.”

  She shook her head. “I suppose that’s your suitcase in the hall?’’

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t stay, Mr. Sayles. We don’t entertain visitors here. I’m sorry that you’ve had your trip for nothing.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Mrs. Walters, I assure you I am not a peddler or a salesman. I’m an old friend of Julian’s and he has asked me to come up here as quickly as I could. I gave up a number of things in New York to get here. I’m afraid I must insist upon seeing him. After that, if he wants me to go back, I shall be only too glad to leave.”

  She shrugged. “You are a foolish young man. You will interrupt his work.”

  “In the letter he sent me he speaks of that. He apparently wants to ask my advice about something connected with it.”

  The effect of this retort of mine was surprising. The assurance faded from her stare and she put one hand against the door jamb as if to steady herself. “Your advice?” she asked incredulously. “What sort of advice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But how can you advise him?” She managed to put an unpleasant emphasis on the first pronoun.

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Did he tell you what he was doing?” Her tone was only superficially casual; underneath its surface was a wariness, as if my answer to her question was the crux of something in her mind.

  “No.”

  She drew a long breath and said, “If you are an old friend of Julian’s you probably knew him when he was at the university?” When I nodded she went on, “That was when his wife died?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “You are much younger than Julian,” she remarked. “Maybe you were one of his pupils?”

  “Well, yes, once,” I admitted. “I’ve been on the faculty for almost ten years.”

  “Oh,” she said. Then, as if she were still puzzled by something, she inquired, “Did you know Helen well?”

  Echoes went reverberating back and back in my mind, and I felt a natural resentment at the question. “Yes, quite well.” That would do for her, even if it didn’t begin to express the truth. This cross-questioning began to puzzle me. What made her so assured of her right to talk to a friend of Julian’s in this fashion? The calm, impersonal way she kept looking at me while she asked me things that were none of her business was of a piece with her words. “Can I supply you with any further information?” I asked her.

  She went on looking at me for a few seconds and then held out her hand. “I’m afraid I have seemed very rude, Professor Sayles. Please excuse it.”

  Her fingers were soft and unexpectedly cold, but there was strength in them. “Of course,” I said. “After all, I did rather barge in and make myself at home.”

  She glanced over the room with a faint smile. “Not much of a home at that,” she observed. “I’m afraid we’ve been too busy to pay much attention to the house. Julian and I are indifferent to such things.”

  I put out a cautious feeler. “We’re all glad he’s working again, Mrs. Walters. That is, I was glad to hear it and Julian’s other friends will be, when they learn about it. He’s too good a man, too important, to . . .” I could not think of a diplomatic way to end the sentence.

  “These tragedies, Mr. Sayles, come to all of us. You cannot imagine what it means to lose touch with one you have loved.”

  “Perhaps not.” I was content to let her statement ride along un-challenged. That was the easier way and, besides, some instinct warned me against letting this woman know anything too personal. Whatever she might be to Julian, I wanted nothing to do with her.

  My lack of responsiveness did not seem to affect her one way or the other. She moved down the room and now, from a position at the farthest window, inquired, “Have you had your breakfast?”

  “In the village on the way out.”

  “That horrible little town!” She was not even turning her head as she spoke.

  “It’s a lovely place to look at.”

  “Yes,” she said in the most matter-of-fact voice, “it’s lovely enough
. The people who live in it are the worst feature of Barsham Harbor.” I thought of the taxi driver and of his acquaintance who had moved away when I came out of the Elite Lunch, and had some inkling of what she meant. But it hardly seemed probable that the rest of the village would be just like them. I made no comment on what she had said and after a time she went on, still without bothering to look at me as she spoke. “We have a woman, a Mrs. Marcy, who comes over at eight to cook for us and do some of the housework. We generally have our morning meal at nine or even later. Julian is up so much of the night.” She sighed. “He works too hard, but I cannot persuade him to slow down. He refuses to pay any attention to his health.”

  I wondered if what she was driving at was that she felt herself a martyr to Julian’s habits. Perhaps she hoped I would intercede with him about staying up too late. But that was wide of the mark—she was getting at something else entirely, though I did not at first see what. “He always used to keep at it night and day when he thought he was on the track of something. In the old days, at least.”

  “The old days—” she began, and then stopped herself. “You will find him changed,” she remarked, still without a glance in my direction. “I hope you won’t blame me for that. I have done what I could to help him, but of course I have no right to manage his life.”

  Again I had the feeling that behind the screen of her words she was trying to pass along some sort of impression to me. What it was supposed to be I could not make out, and felt the discomfort of a man who can’t quite hear a whisper addressed to him. Perhaps she wanted me to understand something about her relation to Julian, but I realized that it wasn’t as simple a matter as that. I decided she was trying to tell me she was not the sort of woman she imagined I must be thinking she was, that she had not simply happened upon an older man broken and at loose ends because he had lost his wife, seen her opportunity and stepped into the gap. There was no possessiveness in the way she spoke of Julian Blair.

  “It’s his life,” I agreed. “Don’t worry about it too much; we all know that Julian won’t listen to anyone. Helen was the only person who ever managed to make him take care of himself.”

  She nodded, and then she said a thing that left me staring at her. “In a way,” she remarked judiciously, as if she were weighing one thing against another, “It’s a pity that his wife died.”

  “Good God,” I said, “how can you talk like that!”

  She looked at me then, and when she spoke she sounded almost as if she were sorry, not for what she had said, but for me. “That must have sounded cold and unfeeling to you. I have a bad habit sometimes of thinking aloud. Don’t misunderstand me—I was speaking purely in terms of Julian’s work. Like you, Mr. Sayles, I believe in Julian—probably a great deal more so than you, as a matter of fact. I have made every sacrifice, contributed everything I could toward his work.” My expression must have showed her what I thought of that high-flown speech, but she went on patiently. “You and I have different ideas about death, too, I don’t doubt. To you it is always a tragedy. To me, seldom. Often death shows us which things are of greatest importance. That was certainly true in Julian’s case.”

  I felt out of my depth and beginning to dislike this woman more with every passing minute. All the time she was talking in this bombastic fashion she had been standing by the window, looking out at the glittering water. I saw as I watched her that the pose was theatrical, that she was looking at the river with the eyes of a gaslight tragedy queen. And yet, there was something about her that was close to magnificence. I told myself that all she amounted to was a fat hulk of a woman, no longer young, in a shapeless sack of a dress and with a ruin of a face. And yet, the trouble was that here was something not quite normal—a woman with an old, sagging, lined face who deliberately let the hard harshness of morning daylight play on her face. “Look,” she seemed to be saying indirectly to me, “see what a mountain of a woman I am! If I was ever beautiful you can see that there is nothing of it left.”

  The nub of the matter was that she ought to have been ridiculous and she wasn’t. I could not feel like smiling at her, even inwardly. I tried to tell myself that this was a silly, vain old woman, but what I actually felt about her was less definable than contempt. It was a good deal closer to uneasiness; whatever was underneath that flesh of hers and that dramatized manner, it was not weak or negligible. Julian’s life must have settled into a strange pattern indeed if it included this woman.

  Finally she turned away from the window, knowing that she had got her effect, and moved heavily down the room once more. There was resilience in the way she walked, for all her weight, and the boards of the old floor did not creak under her tread as you would have expected. She went past me and I could feel the vitality in her. When she got to the doorway she paused and said, “I’ll step into the kitchen for a moment before Mrs. Marcy comes. Just to make sure we have enough to eat. You may care for a second cup of coffee, even if you’ve already had your breakfast.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “If you don’t mind, we’ll wait till later to find a room for you. The bedrooms are all upstairs and I try to keep it quiet up there while he’s asleep.”

  “That’s all right,” I reassured her. “Any time will do. This is an ungodly hour at which to arrive anyhow. If there had been any other train . . .”

  “Of course. This . . . this wilderness is something that we have to adjust ourselves to.” Her eyes avoided mine. “Sometimes I wish Julian hadn’t felt it necessary to come here at all. But he is right, of course. The more remote we are, the better.” She gave me a last quick look and went away down the hall.

  I settled myself on the sofa and filled my pipe. The room was more comfortable now that she had left it, but I was far from feeling at ease. This was a curious situation into which I had strayed and, thinking back over the preceding minutes, it seemed to me that I had told Mrs. Walters a great deal about myself in return for almost nothing in the way of information about Julian or herself. What she was doing here with him was as beyond my power to imagine as why he was here himself.

  Something about the woman stuck uncomfortably in my mind, something less tangible than her appearance or even the things she had said. I could not put my finger on it, but in some way it was connected with her attitude toward Julian. What was there about that which was peculiar? Well, the way she had said “we” in speaking about the two of them. That suggested intimacy, of course, but not the obvious kind of thing at all. There was none of that spurious tenderness that she would have employed if she’d had what used to be called “designs” on him. No, it was something less analyzable than that. There was a tie between them, at least in her mind, but it was not, at any remove whatever, a sexual one. She spoke almost as if she and Julian were partners in some sort of enterprise. Having thought that, I dismissed it because it seemed to me impossible that I could be right. Julian was a great scientist in his way, narrow and limited though he might be outside the field of his own work. This woman was unthinkable in the role of his assistant or collaborator. I let the thought slip away from me.

  That curious theatricality of hers. She had acted at moments like a woman dedicated to something—to the return of the Hapsburgs to the throne or some other noble and semi-public conspiracy. It was something that she believed in herself—that much was plain. And in some way I suspected that it was bound up with her self-assurance.

  After a time I gave up the puzzle and simply sat, smoking and looking out at the river. To eyes accustomed to the Hudson, it was amazingly empty. Not one boat, large or small, appeared on the whole expanse of water visible from the windows. And except for distant rectangles of ploughed fields and the roofs of a few diminutive houses on the opposite shore, it might have been a wilderness river, more primeval than it had been a century before. Staring at the long blue sweep of it and the unchanging outline of the hills beyond, the utter absence of humanity from the scene began to depress me. This was a lonely house and a lonely valley; it w
as not part of the modern world to which I belonged. That was a peopled world, full of human beings and their artifacts, full of movement and activity. This landscape into which I was looking was older and more primitive, unchanging except as the weather and the seasons altered it.

  5.

  FEET WERE coming down the stairs in the hall. The sound of them exorcised the vapors in my mind, and I was surprised at the way my pulse quickened. There was the rapid lightness of youth in the way the footfalls clattered on the stair treads and I knew by their very sound who it was that was coming. Anne, it had to be Anne. What would she be like? Five years would make a lot of difference . . . I remembered the child, but it suddenly occurred to me that, much as we had been together in the old days, I had never noticed the woman that she was going to be. Naturally not, with Helen there and my whole eyes and heart centered on her. Anne had been—almost—my daughter, just as she had always seemed more like Helen’s child than her sister.

  In the instant before she appeared I found I could recall surprisingly little of what she had really been, as a person in her own right and not merely Helen’s much younger sister. All I was sure about was that when I had taken her to the circus or on a picnic, and later to plays and concerts, it had been fun. She had been quiet, with serious eyes, but when she laughed I remembered that I had laughed too, irresistibly.

  Of course she must have changed. But I wished that she could be the same.

  When she came through the door I had a momentary shock. She looked like Helen all over again—the same straight carriage, the same eyes set deep and wide apart, the round, strong throat. Then I noticed the differences. Helen had been white and gold, and this girl was brown—her hair, and the even tan of her skin. Helen had walked gravely, and there was always a reservation in her beauty. Anne, I saw, was not so stately. Her mouth was larger, even making allowances for the grin on it now, and her eyes were a darker blue. She was less conscious of herself, I felt, and most amazingly alive, though it may have been that the house and my own mood contributed to that impression.