The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Lassiter grinned. “You're telling me! You play tennis yourself?”

  “Oh no, I'm not good at things like that.”

  “You probably could be if you tried. But I'm glad you never have. I don't like female athletes.”

  Her surprising sense of ease with this strange American was almost intoxicating. Still, her face remained serene, her mind active. She was still careful.

  “I like watching you play. You seem awfully good.” These sentences sounded so flat she groped for something she hoped would sound better. “There was such a difference between you and your opponent. In the way each of you played, I mean.”

  “So you noticed that?” Lassiter was interested. “That's what makes tennis fascinating. A man's game is a part of his nature, especially in tennis. A man uses what he's got. Now, Carl Bratian – he's the man I was playing with – he's such a little guy he can't hit hard. He built up a game without mistakes, and when he was good he was hard to handle. We were at Princeton together and every now and then Carl would get a good man off his game and cut him down. He took a set off Frank Shields once. He was lucky to do it, of course, and when Shields got going he blew Carl off the court. But that was pretty good, a set off Frank Shields. Right now Carl's washed up. He's been in the advertising business so long he's got no stomach left and that affects his eyes. I'm in rotten shape myself, but I'm in better shape than he is.” Lassiter's voice went on, still separating the words. It had that quiet, resonant timbre which makes a good American voice one of the richest in the world. “Carl and I have always been trying to beat each other. We're good friends, but once we get out on the court something happens to us.”

  Lucy glanced at her wrist watch. “I should tell you,” she said, “the library closes in ten minutes. We only stay open till three on Saturday afternoons.”

  Lassiter gave her another frank look, taking in her features, the line of her throat, her shoulders, and as much of her figure as he could without being rude. He seemed pleased by what he saw, but in such a natural way that Lucy was pleased too.

  He got up from the table. “Okay,” he said. “I'll look around and see what you've got.”

  He went behind the first stack and for a moment or two searched half-heartedly. “What happens in this town on Saturday night?” he said.

  “Not very much, I'm afraid. There's a movie, of course.”

  “I know.” There was the sound of a book falling to the floor. “I've seen the movie.” There was the sound of a book being replaced. “It's a bad one.”

  A moment later his voice came again. “I'm lost among the Makers of Canada. I don't want to be rude about your country, but from the covers on these books it looks to me as if the makers all wore long underwear in the summer. Haven't you got anything new?”

  Lucy joined him behind the stack. “What do you want, a novel?”

  “That would be better. I like a good mystery. Sometimes I even like a good novel.” He followed her to another stack. “I'm the kind of person who always gets lost in a library. In my last year in Princeton I had the key to the stack, but I used to let the desk-girls get the stuff for me.”’ Reaching the novel shelves, he extracted a book by Scott Fitzgerald which he held up to the light. “The Great Gatsby,” he said. “Do you like Fitzgerald?”

  “Very much.”

  “He's a Princeton man, too. But I like Hemingway better. Some of his stuff I've read three times.”

  Lassiter returned the book and looked around again. For a fraction of a second, Lucy met his eyes. They were deep brown, deeper than her own. On the court, squinting into the sun, their colour had been lost and his face had looked boyish and hard by turn. These large eyes of his both deepened and softened his expression, and she glanced away quickly, shaken by the intimacy of his stare.

  “These are all the novels we have,” she said. “You can help yourself.”

  She returned to her desk and the moment was broken. Two middle-aged women came in the door, saying loudly how thankful they were it was not quite three o'clock. Lucy sighed with relief. When Lassiter brought two books to be marked, the women were still at the desk, and as they were still talking, he gave them a quick glance and left without comment.

  ON Monday morning in Grenville, waking later than usual, Stephen Lassiter lay flat on his back watching the sunshine make patterns on the flowered wallpaper of the best room on the second floor back of the Bessborough Arms. There was a cheap hunting print on the wall opposite the end of the bed; an English hunt, the Belvoir or the Bicester, he had forgotten which. With its rolling fields of intense green, with the sleek-coated horses and hounds, the picture reminded him of his boyhood. He had not belonged to a hunting family; far from it. It was the landscape in the picture which touched him: the gentle, cultivated, well-loved fields, the memory of happy days before he had learned how to worry.

  He had wakened last night at four and stayed awake until six. A man could think of a lot in the two hours before dawn.

  For three years as a small boy Stephen had lived in a large country house in Dutchess County. There had been lawns about the house and stately old trees, an ancient coach house and a stable with six horses. He and his sister Marcia had been taught to ride by a wizened old man who weighed less than a hundred pounds, a leathery-faced old son-of-a-bitch called Georgie Smith, who had been the greatest chewer and spitter and the dirtiest-mouthed man Stephen had ever met in his life. When Marcia and Stephen used some of the words they had learned from Georgie, their mother never reproved them – Sarah Lassiter thought it wrong to reprove a child for anything – but her husband took them out to the garage and whipped them, making them bend over a sawhorse and laying three strokes onto their backsides with a strip of brake lining so hard that Marcia screamed with rage and bit her father's hand.

  To his children, Abel Lassiter had always been unpredictable because he was so busy they saw him only at stray moments, and at these times it was understood that he was irritable because he was tired, and he was tired because he was such an important man. He often informed Marcia and Stephen that their mother spoiled them, and he liked to tell them what his own father would have done to him if he had been as idle as they were. But at other times he seemed proud of them and on birthdays and Christmas he always gave them gifts of money, telling them to buy something they really wanted.

  Stephen and his sister had grown up fully conscious of the difference in birth between their parents. Sarah Lassiter came from the Gresham family, old New England stock with ship-owners, mill-masters, clergymen, and finally with intellectuals behind her. She had been a pretty woman, capricious, popular with men, accustomed to a great deal of flattery, and proud of being the rebel in a conventional family. She had many relations who spoke with Harvard accents and had that careful graciousness of manner which makes the American gentry seem the most considerate people in the world. Stephen liked them, and when younger he had been at ease with them, yet he had never been able to take them seriously. The reason for this attitude was his father.

  Abel Lassiter had been born on a dirt farm forty miles west of St. Louis, and when he was four years old his whole family had moved into western Kansas and homesteaded in the downland country. Abel's father had been a fierce Baptist and in his Missouri days a deacon in the church. Abel himself never bothered much about churches, but he often told Stephen there was nothing better than a Baptist church for putting an edge on a man. This was a favourite phrase of his; he would never hire a man for anything but a routine job unless he was sure he had an edge. In time, he made it a principle to hire no man with a happy face.

  Stephen had never forgotten a book his father had given him once for his birthday. It was called Great Men of America, and apart from Thomas Edison, there was not a man in the book who was not an industrialist, a financier, or a railroad king. Their lives had seemed to Stephen depressingly similar. Each had his own variation of the same formula for success. Each had his own variation of the same look in the eyes. “Outside of Morgan,” Ab
el Lassiter told his son, “there was hardly one of them who had it soft the way you do.”

  Stephen had always felt a little guilty because his boyhood had not been hard enough, and for a time in his youth he tried to make up for it by talking tough and training to be a boxer. In his first contest he beat up his opponent for three rounds but was too clumsy to score a clean knockout and the result was a bloody mess. That was how he discovered how much he hated hurting people.

  Once Stephen's father took him into New York early on a Monday morning, and without explanation led him into the stock exchange. Stephen was only twelve at the time, it was a busy morning, and the boy listened in frightened amazement to hard-eyed men shouting at each other about the trading posts. His father tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Like them?” Stephen shook his head. “Then remember this,” his father said. “Any one of those men makes more money on a good day than your mother's brothers make in a year.” After this he had taken his son to the ferry and crossed to Jersey City, and they drove in a street car through what seemed miles of slum streets where the people all looked foreign and dirty children brawled at the corners and darted in and out of alleys. Finally they came to the radiator factory controlled by Abel Lassiter, and Stephen observed the deferential way the foreman spoke to his father. It was a hideously ugly place. There was no splendid pageant of blazing molten steel and the machinery was not impressive. The painting of the radiators was done by individual men spraying the liquid aluminum onto the moulds. Through a cobwebbed ground-floor window some of the blighted landscape around the factory was visible with rusted metal lying in disorderly piles among scattered weeds. His father's unblinking grey eyes fixed themselves on his son. “Do you like this place?” Stephen said he hated it. “All right,” his father said. “You hate it. Do you like where we live?” Stephen said he loved where they lived. “All right,” his father said again. “Do you know why we can afford to live there?” He waited for an answer while Stephen hung his head. “Because two hundred men,” his father said in a steady voice, “live and work in this place which you hate. You'd better get to like places like this, son. The places that make the dollars are never pretty.”

  It was the next year that Abel Lassiter sold his property in Dutchess County and moved into a duplex apartment in New York. “A year or two more in the country and I'd have been putting down roots,” he said. “If you want to get ahead, don't buy a house. Your family will get to like it and raise hell when you want to move on.” The money from the sale of the property was used as the final extra sum necessary for buying out the rest of the shareholders in the radiator factory, thus giving Abel Lassiter complete ownership.

  Those were the years when Stephen went to school in Lawrenceville, while Marcia lived at home and went to a private school in the city and claimed to be much more of a New Yorker than Stephen was. The next move was to Pittsburgh. In Stephen's final year at Princeton his father moved to Cleveland, where he merged his old radiator company with a Cleveland firm which produced bathtubs and another which made toilet bowls and sinks. The result of the merger was the Sani-Quip Corporation, which became one of the largest junior competitors in the plumbing field.

  After three years in Cleveland, Abel Lassiter moved to Detroit. He had long been interested in the automobile industry and had already introduced into his Cleveland plant an adaptation of auto-body presses to stamp bathtubs, toilet bowls, and sinks. The ware produced by the new process was of light and inferior quality but could be made at about a third the cost of the older products and therefore could undercut all competition.

  Abel Lassiter liked Detroit, considering it the city with the greatest future in America. He had always felt a distrust for New York, mingled with a strong subterranean hostility against it because it was too powerful, too rich, and too enormous to despise. The rawness of Detroit, the acres of ugly houses where the workers lived, gave him an instinctive confidence and assurance that here he would not be likely to meet people like his wife's brothers who would judge a man by values which all his instincts proclaimed ridiculous. Here his bank account and past record could do the talking for him. Yet it was in Detroit that he ruined himself.

  In 1928, going against the advice of his banking friends, he mortgaged his future to found an aircraft factory. After the crash a good many businessmen asked each other why he had done it in such a grandiose and almost defiant way, for he had always had the reputation of being a sound man, if not an especially cautious one. They might have looked inside their own minds for the answer, for it is hardly reasonable to believe that any man will do things necessary to make a million or more dollars unless he has some childhood dream to lead him on. In the case of Abel Lassiter the dream was a simple one. Railroads had trailed their names over the prairies where he grew up, and even now their names sounded magical whenever he heard them. His name would flash across the sky. Farm boys in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Idaho, farm boys perhaps all over the world, would look up and point at the shining silver wings of the planes he would build and repeat his name as they recognized the make.

  His assembly lines were set up, vast quantities of materials of all kinds were stock-piled, his safe bulged with contracts to firms all over the country when the market broke in 1929. The small bank he controlled in New Jersey was one of the first victims. Then the large banks which were financing the Detroit venture cracked down. Sani-Quip stock cataracted when the rumour went about that Abel Lassiter was no longer sound. He was forced to sell, first his control and then his last remaining stock, in the company that had been his dream. A year later his heart gave out and he died.

  It was significant that it never occurred to Stephen that his father was guilty of a flagrant business mistake; that his father's real talent had not been judgment or ability to absorb knowledge but a furious drive forward which in the end he had been unable to control. Because Stephen had always feared his father, he thought of him as infallible, like God. Therefore it was inevitable that he thought of the Depression as a sort of cosmic accident.

  In any case, his father's failure had changed his son's life. Stephen left his post graduate studies at MIT to go to Detroit for the funeral, and never returned to Cambridge to take his degree. He looked for a job instead. His mother was protected by her own personal inheritance which guaranteed her six thousand a year. Marcia got married two months after her father's death. Stephen was alone.

  Waiting for a job to turn up in a collapsed market, he remembered the hard faces in Great Men of America. He realized he would now have to build a career from the ground up among men like these. It was a process he had never counted on. If his father had died with an intact fortune, Stephen's plans would have been certain. He would have sold out his interest in Sani-Quip and put all he had into the aircraft factory. After a time, when the business was firm in his hands, he would have hired the finest technicians available and, working with them, have produced a new plane of his own, and then he would have flown it around the world as Howard Hughes had done.

  Instead he had been glad to take a job from one of his father's former underlings in Sani-Quip. He still remembered the glint in Ashweiler's Pennsylvania Dutch eyes the first time he entered his office. Under Ashweiler's scrutiny, he remembered one of his father's sparse sayings: “Everybody is afraid. Find out what he's afraid of and you've got him. Find out what you're afraid of yourself and keep your mouth shut about it. Then you can make your fear work for you. Fear is worth millions, both ways.”

  What did Stephen fear? It wasn't easy to say without sounding foolish. Certainly not people, or getting hurt. But what was the use of counting the things he didn't fear when he knew perfectly well, deep inside, what he was afraid of? Ever since he could remember he had been haunted by the feeling that he could never measure up to the men his father had tamed and mastered.

  A WAGON wheel creaked on the side road leading down to the lake beside the Bessborough Arms. The sound seemed to hang poised in the silence. Then a cicada sc
reamed. Stephen breathed heavily, telling himself it was going to be another hot day.

  He loved heat. He loved his present sense of physical well-being. It was at least two months since he had wakened with a hangover. Sunday morning he had spent swimming and lying on the sand, and in the afternoon Carl Bratian, on his way back from Toronto, had stopped and played several more sets of tennis with him. He had taken Carl to the cleaner's this time. Forehand and backhand, he had lammed the ball from corner to corner with almost a perfect length; it had been one of those days when everything came off. After three sets Carl had quit, looking dead.

  He was a funny little man, Carl Bratian. He was the son of immigrant parents and he had always worked twice as hard as anyone else, even when playing games. He had an infectious grin and to most people he seemed happy; yet the curious thing about him was that, in spite of this outward appearance, he was the kind of man Abel Lassiter would have hired.

  Stephen's eyes closed again. Insects shrilled in the warm sunshine and he felt young again. His breathing slowed to a quiet rhythm. He liked Grenville, but it was a lonely place. At night you looked at the stars over the lake and you thought if you didn't have a woman soon you wouldn't be able to stand it. At night you thought about everything, you asked yourself vague questions, and after a few hours you felt as cheap as a man waiting for the check at the Stork Club with a dollar-fifty in his pocket. He almost fell asleep. He saw an airplane flying over a sea of clouds, then over the turning globe itself. They would do that some day, they would rocket completely clear of the world. A faint snore passed his parted lips.

  “I left my shaving lotion in Toronto.”

  Lassiter opened his eyes and saw in the doorway, above a dressing gown of red silk, the smooth, swarthy face and the big nose of Carl Bratian.

  “Look in the bathroom,” he said and turned to the wall.

  He closed his eyes again and presently heard Bratian's voice coming from a long distance.