The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  Much as I did not like that woman, I had to admire the sure, executive way she was handling the whole miserable business. I told her that I was not cross, and to get on back to Mrs. Marcy, and promised that we’d return with a doctor in an hour or less, and that we wouldn’t stop at Marcy’s—though I had some mental reservations about that last. Then a horn honked outside the door and I went out into the yard.

  The rain was still falling, but not in gusts and torrents. It looked as though it might stop in half an hour or so, but it was still coming down fast enough to make me sprint for the battered Ford sedan in which Anne was sitting. Maine mud and dust were plastered all over it, but the motor sounded smooth under the hood. Even before my door was closed Anne was wrenching the car around and stepping it up from gear to gear. As we straightened out into the road the machine slewed sickeningly and I perceived that this was going to be quite a ride. The storm had soaked the loose top dirt of the track and turned it into a slimy lubricant between our wheels and the underlying hardpan. We skidded at every rut.

  “How about chains?”

  Anne didn’t take her eyes off the road, but she grinned. “Haven’t any, Dick. Don’t worry.” We struck a pothole. When the car was back on an even keel she said, “Do you think we ought to stop off at Marcy’s anyhow? It’ll be a mile, and ten minutes out of our way if the phone isn’t working.”

  “No,” I answered. “I guess Mrs. Walters is right about that. We won’t save much time even if the phone is working and it seems to me like a poor gamble.”

  “Probably.” She avoided a crater full of brown water and wrestled the car back across the slimy surface of the road. “Seth Marcy’s nobody’s pet, anyhow. I’ve only seen him a couple or times, but he’s the kind of man who doesn’t open his mouth unless he has something unpleasant to say. I feel sorry for Elora.”

  “We’ll forget him, then, till we get a doctor. After that we can go to his house and tell him.”

  We went on, not exactly racing but making incredible speed for the condition of the road. Anne handled the car with a magnificent blend of daring and judgment; I thought we weren’t going to make the bridge at the turn by the creek, but we got across it by a hair, and when we hit the road along the far bank of the bay the going was better. Even with the chances Anne took, I did not feel nervous about her driving. There was competence in the way her hands were resting on the wheel, in the way she sat behind it, alert but not tense. It was, indeed, strangely pleasant, that ride. We were in a private world of our own, with rain on our roof and streaking down the windows, shutting us in together. I liked it. For a mile or so I forgot our errand, forgot the bleak house behind us, and thought of nothing except that this fortuitous intimacy was different from anything that had ever happened to me before.

  After twenty minutes or perhaps a little longer, the unlovely center of Barsham Harbor was flashing past our windows. I have often wished since that I had looked at my watch more frequently that day, but it was still in the side pocket of my coat, where I had put it when we went swimming, and I remembered it only as we pulled into town. It was ten minutes after four then and the light was already beginning to fade, thanks to the clouds and the rain.

  Our luck seemed to be out from the moment we hit the town. There were, it appeared, three doctors in Barsham Harbor. Dr. Peters was out on a call. Dr. Solomon, whom we tried next, had gone to Bath and was not expected back for several hours. The third and last was Dr. Rambouillet. His house was beyond the Catholic church on the other side of the railroad tracks and his small shingle looked inauspiciously new. But he was at home.

  “Dr. Peters is the Marcy family doctor,” he said to us when we told him our errand. “I think you’d better get him. The people here . . .” he shrugged with the Latinity of the French Canadian.

  “He’s out on a call,” I said. “This is an emergency.”

  With no more demur he picked up his bag and got into the car. “All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The teeth under his narrow black mustache were startling when he smiled. He couldn’t have been over twenty-eight. “I’ll do what I can,” he declared, “and then turn the case over to Dr. Peters. You see,” and he smiled again disarmingly, “the people of Barsham Harbor either do want a French Canadian doctor or they don’t. We keep to our own sides of the fence. Or perhaps I ought to say, of the tracks. You understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and sympathize . . . What was your school, Doctor?”

  “McGill. And the ink is quite dry on the diploma.”

  I laughed. Anne was too busy driving to pay much attention to what we were saying. The day was drawing in and she switched on the lights when we turned right at the bridge. I watched the road slither and dance under our wheels. The thought went through my head that it was impossible I had got off the State of Maine express only that morning. This day had been going on for half a lifetime already. I was tired and sleepy. The thing to do would be to get to bed as soon after supper as was decently possible.

  The sight of the house ahead of us, black and solid in the twilight, reminded me that there was plenty still to be done before any of us could think of supper or sleep. Anne slid the car to a stop right at the kitchen steps, and we piled out and through the door in a hurry. The situation on the other side of the threshold made me, for one, feel stupefiedly foolish.

  13.

  WHY I SHOULD have been so taken aback by the sight of Mrs. Walters setting the table I don’t quite know, except that we had come racing home to the house to cope with an emergency, and Mrs. Walters at a household task was nothing like what I had expected. Perhaps it was her calmness that stopped me in my tracks, the very domesticity of her appearance in a big, blue-figured dress and an apron, leisurely laying out knives and forks. When she turned to face us, there was a look of embarrassment on her face.

  “Oh, dear!” she said in the warmest tones I had yet heard from her. “What a pity you’ve had all the hurry and trouble for nothing.”

  “For nothing!” Anne’s voice was incredulous.

  “I’m afraid so. Mrs. Marcy is perfectly all right again. I suppose I took it too seriously when I saw her lying there at the foot of the stairs. She frightened me and I jumped to the conclusion that she was badly hurt. But she got up not five minutes after you’d started. I made her wait round for a while, but she was so obviously recovered that I finally sent her home. She insisted she was entirely over it, but I felt it would be better if she did not work any more today. She kept trying to help me and finally I sent her home, as I said. You were gone a long time.”

  Dr. Rambouillet put his black satchel down on the floor and sighed, but it seemed to me that there was an expression of relief on his face. “You are sure she was all right?” he inquired. “No sign of sleepiness? No thickness of the tongue? No difficulty in speaking?”

  “Not that I could see.” Mrs. Walters had returned to her table setting and I noticed that the hand with which she put out the water glasses was entirely steady.

  That woman was, I think, a great actress, the greatest I have ever seen. Nothing in the way she looked, spoke, or acted, was other than natural, ordinary, even casual. After a silence that was long enough to show how calm she was, she turned to us and went on, “I wasn’t sure I should let her start home so soon, frankly. I loaned her my umbrella and I went part way down the road with her to make sure. She was all right. I’m positive of it. She didn’t seem to have even a sprain. Her only complaint was that she had a headache.”

  “Well . . .” the doctor said uncertainly, “from what you say, there should be no danger of a concussion. And evidently there were no broken bones.”

  Mrs. Walters bridled at the reluctance in his voice. “I would not have let her take a step out of this house if I hadn’t been sure she was all right. Of course, you can stop by at Marcy’s and see her, if you want, Dr . . .?”

  “Rambouillet,” said that young man politely.

  “Oh. Are you the Marcys’ usual doctor?”
r />   “No,” he answered shortly. “Dr. Peters was out on a call.”

  The minute he said that she had him right where she wanted him. But the way she managed it was masterful and, even now, in remembering it, I am moved to a grudging admiration of the way she carried it all off. “I see,” she remarked so casually that I barely caught the note of triumph in her voice. “Well, then, I suppose they’ll have called him by this time if there’s any need.”

  Rambouillet nodded. “Undoubtedly.” He turned to Anne and me. “I’m sorry, but there’s apparently nothing here for me to do. And since I didn’t come out in my own car, I’m afraid I’ll have to trouble you to run me back into town.”

  We said we would and Anne went upstairs to get a coat. I offered the doctor a drink, which he declined, and forced him to accept three dollars, which he felt he hadn’t earned. A call was a call, I pointed out, and he was entitled to a fee even if there had been no patient. He put the money in his pocket finally, with a wry smile. “A young doctor in this town,” he remarked, “has no right to refuse anything that comes his way.” We chatted quietly in that warm, agreeable kitchen, hardly aware of Mrs. Walters as she went about the room. And yet, it crossed my mind once or twice that she looked more attractive than she had in the morning. The lamplight was kind to her face and there was a touch of femininity about her dress that was welcome. I wondered idly why she had changed. Probably she’d got wet walking back in the rain after giving Mrs. Marcy her umbrella.

  Later I came to have a different opinion about that, but at the time I hardly thought about it at all—what dress Mrs. Walters wore was a matter of no interest or importance to me. Or so I would have considered if I had thought about it at all, which I didn’t.

  Anne came back in five minutes and the three of us went out to the car. The rain had slacked to a drizzle and night was at hand. A heavy gray twilight shut the house in upon itself and the heat of the day had gone; the air was cold and raw. Mrs. Walters stood in the door and watched us as we drove off; the lamplight came out from behind her and threw a blotched, half-formed shadow of her big body across the yard.

  As we drove in silence back toward Barsham Harbor I thought how puppetlike we had all been, moving around at the ends of our strings while Mrs. Walters pulled them. Able and competent she certainly was, but it was impossible to like her. Since Mrs. Marcy was all right, the episode had turned out to be a trivial one and yet, it seemed to me that Mrs. Walters had acted throughout it with a firmness and decision that were somehow unnecessary.

  The truth was that I was full of that petty resentment which a man feels when he thinks a woman has acted with more authority and energy in an emergency than he himself has done.

  On the trip home I drove the car and Anne sat beside me. In the glow of the dash light her face was tired and thoughtful. I thought how very young and sweet and defenseless she looked, and wanted to put my arm around her. But that would have been ridiculous. After all, a practically middle-aged college professor has no business making passes at girls. Besides, I was afraid of doing anything to mar the feeling between us. After a while she stirred in her seat and looked at me. “I’m glad Mrs. Marcy is all right,” she said slowly. “I like that little person, Dick. She’s had so much hard luck in her life.”

  “I know.”

  “If that woman let her walk home and she wasn’t perfectly all right, I’m going to make trouble about it.”

  “She was all right. I doubt if Mrs. Walters makes many mistakes in the course of a year.”

  That brought a smile. “I suppose you’re right. It’s nice not having to confront her alone, Dick. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “It sounds contrary to common sense,” I said, “but I’m glad I am too.”

  We said no more on the ride. As the Marcy house dropped past us on the left I had a momentary impulse to turn in. But I didn’t yield to it. There seemed no real necessity. When the car finally slithered to a stop in the yard, Mrs. Walters opened the kitchen door and called to us. “Hurry up, you two. Supper in five minutes.”

  I put the car in the barn and went back to the house. For the first time that day I went to my room to get ready for the meal. It was a square, small cubicle with two windows looking northward and also down onto the yard and the roof of the ell. There was nothing in it but a cot, a battered washstand, and one chair. The single candle they had given me burned small and cold on the stand; its light wavered and leaped in the raw air so that the place was full of sudden, shapeless shadows. As I changed my shirt and combed my hair I felt an uneasiness which I recognized coming back into my consciousness. It was a kind of mental discomfort, rather than anything stronger, and it had been in my mind more than once in the course of this day.

  By a sort of casual introspection I tried to find out what, specifically, it was that bothered me. The house, for one thing, I decided— if you are not used to dark, cold rooms with a single candle for light the experience is a strange one, belonging to our ancestors’ ordinary routine of life, perhaps, but not to that of a modern city dweller. And Mrs. Walters. I did not like her, or the dark that had settled over the house—Julian ought not to have such a woman around and why hadn’t he put electric lights into the rooms since he had wired in the power? The lamp in the kitchen and the candle in this room were separate islands of light and there were too many shadows between them. I thought of the hall outside my door and it seemed to me that there might be someone in it, but when I looked out it was empty and silent. I thought of the shadowy living room, of the river water noiselessly running and running, almost under the sills of its windows. A hundred years and more this house had stood here, alone on the Point. A hundred years of sun and storm, of winters and summers, of dark and light. It was old, but it was not its age that gave me the tight feeling I had in the pit of my stomach.

  In the end I had to give up the effort to discover what I thought was wrong. There were too many possibilities and nothing probable. The accident, when I thought about it, did not seem to explain the feeling wholly, though I admitted to myself that when I had seen Mrs. Marcy lying in that unnatural way at the foot of the stairs I had thought for one instant, “Now it’s happened.” But that was obviously meaningless. As it turned out, nothing had happened. And equally, if the accident had been important in some way, I could not see why or to whom—except Mrs. Marcy—it was important. What the “it” was that had happened I did not understand, though I assigned it to the feeling of imminence which had come over me earlier in the afternoon. That, in turn, was unquestionably caused by the approach of the thunderstorm. Still, the lightning and thunder, and most of the rain, had long ago swept away to the northeast and it seemed to me that the air was as charged with suspense as ever. Suspense, I reminded myself, is a purely subjective matter. There was no way of telling whether the way I felt had any external foundation or not.

  Difficult to believe though it may seem, I paid little attention to the notion that Julian and his invention might account for my disquietude. I felt pity and sorrow for him, but they were ordinary, normal emotions. As for the thing he had made, it was only too apparent that it was harmless—like those perpetual motion machines that unbalanced inventors are forever producing. No machine could approach the complex sensitivity of the human mind itself and, if our brains had not, after centuries, given us any sure proof that the individuality survives the fact of death, then it was certain that Julian’s machine wouldn’t either. Perhaps, if I had been superstitious, I would have been inclined to give more weight to that project of his. The house would have been “haunted” by its presence and the potential presence of the myriads of voices that were supposed to speak through it. But they weren’t there. Of that I felt sure. Just as it was self-evident that a physical machine could not be expected to produce a nonphysical result.

  The very impossibility of the machine’s working brought home to me the difficulty of doing anything to help Julian. His frailty told me how little time there was left in which to save him, if
he could be saved, and the driving eagerness I had heard in his voice when he talked showed how strong was the obsession I should have to break through. The impression which he gave of being cut off from all reality distressed me when I thought about it. I had promised Anne not to fail, and promised myself, too. I owed something to Julian and, as I thought about him, I was ashamed of myself for bothering with the vague fancies and premonitions that had been running through my head. Why had I puzzled so much over them and so little over how I was to save my friend?

  As I stood in that dim, cold room, trying to straighten my tie in the shadowy disk of my shaving mirror, no answer came back to that question; only a vague feeling and intuition that the question itself was not the crux of the situation. It is hard to convey intangible suggestions in the rigid forms and patterns of words, but what I felt then was a kind of fear. The trouble was that it was a fear without an object. All I was sure of was that I was not afraid of Julian and not even for him, except in a general sort of way. Neither was it Mrs. Walters. Thinking about her intensified the sensation slightly, but she was not the source of it, and the fact that it apparently had no focal point began to annoy me. I was like a man walking down an unfamiliar street in a strange city, late at night, with a vague substratum of uneasiness in his mind. He does not say to himself, “Maybe I am going to get held up and beaten in this place.” He simply feels uneasy. But if he sees the shadow of a man shouldered back in a doorway his fear rushes together like wind to the heart of a cyclone. It fastens itself on that figure and embodies itself with its image. My fear seemed to have no such focal point; it colored the rest of my thoughts but it had no shape of its own.

  That, I was forced to tell myself finally, was evasion. In the back of my mind I did know of what I was afraid, but it was senseless to allow it to color my consciousness so poisonously. It was nothing more specific than the noise that we had heard, Anne and I, as we ran toward the house in the rain. But why was I afraid of that sound, or rather, of hearing it again? I finished my dressing quickly, not liking to think about it. For from the moment I had remembered that noise I found myself listening for it again.