The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Spring Time! What a hell of a name for a shaving lotion!”

  Lassiter heard faint slapping sounds as Bratian massaged the lotion into his skin. Carl felt undressed unless he smelled like a man who had just left the barber's chair.

  “With this kind of merchandise,” Bratian's voice came to him, “the name is everything. It's the principal thing you're selling – the name, the bottle, and the smell. What would a man feel like, going into a drugstore and asking for Spring Time? He'd feel like you did the first time you asked for Ramses.”

  Lassiter heard Bratian emerge and say he would see him for breakfast. Then he rolled over again and daydreamed between boyhood and manhood. Occasionally an idea shot up and nearly wakened him, then died out as the flood of images poured over, drowning it in the sea of himself.

  He saw a much younger Stephen Lassiter standing against the wall of his bedroom in the old house. He was home for vacation the year he had made the school football and tennis teams for the first time. His mother had just marked up his increase in height on the wall and noted the date. He felt her fingers lightly exploring his shoulders and biceps and the special tennis muscle that made a knot like iron at the upper end of his forearm just by the elbow. He was grinning down at her. She was small and the prettiest woman in the world. Her body was frail and graceful and she had never weighed more than a hundred and three pounds. He saw the amused pride in her eyes because he, her only son, was growing so big. It was then that an idea had formed: FRAIL WOMEN LIKE POWERFUL MEN. It was true. That was the basis of his mother's fondness for his father which had survived all their quarrels and arguments. He remembered his mother's cool voice saying, “Life might have been easier for me if I'd married somebody of my own sort, but it would have been dull. When the women in a country grow stronger than the men it's a sure sign of decadence. Your father is a very strong man, Stephen, so we can afford to overlook a lot of things about him that otherwise we couldn't. Weak men are like born gentlemen. They can't afford not to be charming.” His mother had been a great reader of books and she often said things like that. And she was dead accurate. My God, when you went to New York and Boston these days, the kind of men you saw in the best places! They were getting soft, all right. You saw them in the bars with long-thighed women who could have handled any three of them the same night and cried for more. He knew the look those women had. He'd seen it directed often enough at himself. He would enter a bar or merely walk across the Plaza at five in the afternoon when they were out in the street, and the looks would be exchanged as frankly as in a whorehouse. They wanted a man with a body like his who could really manhandle them, but they wanted money too, and probably they wanted money more than anything else, otherwise they wouldn't bother with some of the oyster-handed men you saw them with. They wanted change and variety, and they needed money to get it. Joyce, for instance. At first, Joyce had never been able to have too much of him. Then suddenly she had become bored, he was not varied enough for her, she said; she criticized the things he liked doing, she let him feel she had no confidence in him. Joyce was a born wanter, and whatever she gave she measured out. You never saw in her eyes the really marvellous look a woman had sometimes, the look his mother used to have, the look a small town girl like that one in the library had, the shy boldness you knew could develop into almost anything if the right man gave it a chance.

  Lassiter almost fell asleep again. The sheet down to his waist, he lay over on his back while his chest heaved steadily to his breathing. A cataract of images poured through his mind. He saw men working, wheels turning, tennis balls shooting across nets, he saw a girl's legs and arms unfolding milky-white in slow motion, and then, with exquisite leisure, a bomb looping out from the open bay of an aircraft flying over New York, down into the maze of buildings between the Chrysler and the Empire State, down into a noiseless explosion that blossomed into a full-blown talisman rose.

  He sat up, wide awake. He would be late for the office. He felt the familiar prick of urgency along his nerves, the feeling that he was not doing enough, that he was slipping behind. He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, and his animal vitality returned as the cold jets bristled against his skin. He towelled and shaved and rubbed his face with the lotion Carl Bratian had used ten minutes earlier. He looked critically at the bottle. With its conventional shape and label it looked as old-fashioned as Moxie.

  He returned to the bedroom and dressed. Those bottles of shaving lotion were the only things in the world he got more or less free. The little place that made them was the sole survivor of his father's varied enterprises, and now he himself was the sole owner. It netted him about eight hundred dollars a year. The little bald-headed Rahway barber who had founded the business was now its manager and sole operative. Lassiter's father had taken the place over for a bad debt, and it was the final irony of the old man's career that a converted barber shop making shaving lotion was the only one of his enterprises to weather the Depression.

  In the dining room he found Bratian smoking a cigarette with a coffee cup in his hand, and Stephen broke into a wide grin. The little man was dressed like a Hollywood version of an English squire. The pebbly brown leather of his imported shoes had a dark, lustreless stain which exactly matched the shade of the Norfolk jacket he had bought, not at Brooks, but at a private tailor's he claimed was more select. His handkerchief was folded into his pocket like part of a design. But he had been unable to resist the temptation of a ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. The ring was large, glowing red, and Bratian claimed it was a genuine ruby.

  “This is filthy coffee,” he said as Lassiter sat down. “You know, if somebody came up here and went into the hotel business he could make a lot of money. I haven't had any decent food since I crossed the border.”

  Lassiter smiled at the waitress who stood near the door. She nodded and went into the kitchen, knowing that he ate the same breakfast day after day.

  “What they ought to do,” Bratian went on, “is take an old-fashioned-looking place and panel it like an English grill-room. There are quite a few old-looking places between here and Kingston. They have real quality. Take a place like that and fix it up with brown walnut panels and heavy-looking silver on the sideboards and a big headwaiter with a black suit and a red face. Give Americans the same kind of food they get at home, but make the surroundings look old and British. These people are stupid. They give Americans the kind of surroundings they find in Napoleon, Ohio, and then they make them eat English food as well.”

  Lassiter drank his orange juice and grinned. Ever since he had known the little man, Bratian had been telling him people were stupid. Bratian leaned back and looked at the clock over the door. The hands showed five minutes to nine.

  “Don't you have to go to work?”

  “Most of the real work is done now. I'm boss of my own time anyway. I'm working on my report for Ashweiler now.”

  Bratian contemplated the ceiling from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. Lassiter's nostrils twitched as some of the smoke reached them.

  “What's that weed you smoke? It stinks.”

  Bratian produced a gold cigarette case and snapped it open. “There's only one place in New York where you can get these. They're Greek. Look at the quality of the ash they make.” He held up the end of his cigarette. “What you smoke is camel dung.” He put the case away. “This firm doesn't do any advertising. They're damn fools of course, but they give you the stuff. Don't you know the more a cigarette is advertised the worse it's bound to be?”

  “You ought to know.”

  “Your sister smokes these now. I introduced her to them.”

  Lassiter had begun to eat his cereal, but now he put down his spoon. “Where have you been seeing Marcia?”

  Bratian showed very white teeth in a wide grin. “Everybody sees her.”

  “I don't.”

  “So she told me. I like her. I always did. She interests me. She'd been happier if she'd grown up in Europe. She's that type.”<
br />
  Lassiter picked up his spoon, vaguely annoyed at Bratian's air of intimacy.

  “She's thinking of going to Sondberg now,” Bratian went on. “She told me he's promised to fix her up so she can live in peace with her vices. You know what Marcia's like. She pretends to kid, but underneath she's a pretty serious girl. That's why I get a kick out of her, Steve. Underneath, Marcia always wants to do the right thing.”

  A tight expression bore down on Lassiter's mouth. “I don't know what's the matter with her. I never did. And who the hell is Sondberg?”

  “The psychoanalyst. You mean to say you never heard of him?”

  “Why should I have heard of him? What's the matter now? Does Marcia think she's crazy?”

  Bratian grinned. “No, she's only uncomfortable. They tell me Sondberg's making a lot of money. He's the one that worked on that Catholic priest a few years ago – you know, that Father Donnelley who got himself analyzed and then told the papers that all religions rested on a guilt-complex.”

  “Do you take that stuff seriously?”

  Bratian grinned.

  “How do you always know about people like that?” Lassiter said when he got no answer. Then he finished his cereal in silence and leaned back to wait for the next course. The bacon and eggs came and he began to eat while Bratian watched him. After devouring one egg and four rashers of bacon, he laid down his knife and fork. “Look, Carl – what was behind all those questions you were asking me last night about my business?”

  “Haven't you guessed?”

  “I'm not a mind reader.”

  Bratian's face assumed an expression which Lassiter had seen on it many times before, and only lately was beginning to understand. It was an expression so ancestral that it made his English-style clothes look ridiculous. The man who wore such an expression should also be wearing a turban and long silk robes in which the limbs would move suavely. He should be sitting on cushions, not on a hard chair in an Ontario hotel. The expression flashed away, leaving a grin which showed some malice, much cynicism, and even a little affection.

  “Eat your breakfast, Steve. If you've got time, we can talk about it afterwards.”

  “Should I be worrying?”

  “Nobody should worry.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Lassiter said, and began to laugh.

  THIS was a morning for remembering. Lassiter's own words had recalled him to another morning fifteen years ago. The place was Princeton. He had just entered the university from Lawrenceville; big, popular, and assuming correctly that the coach had heard all about him. At the first freshman practice Carl Bratian presented himself, and the big nose and swarthy skin under the brown helmet made him the most conspicuous man on the field. Under his pads, the wiry body was like a dwarf's with a humpback. He grinned at everybody, as eager to please as a newsboy at his first basketball practice in the Y.M.C.A., and Lassiter, too young to realize the cruelty of his remark, not really meaning anything by it except that he was surprised at seeing such a man on a Princeton football field, turned to a friend and said carelessly: “Who let that son of a bitch in here?”

  Three weeks later he considered Carl his friend. He had tackled him so hard he broke his collarbone and knocked him out, and after the accident had visited him in the infirmary because that seemed the right thing to do. Carl pretended to be indifferent about the injury, but he was pleased to find a man of such importance in his class sitting at his bedside.

  “I was stupid,” he said. He had a harsh New York accent which he was later to smooth down, but even then his English was precise. If he talked tough, he talked tough like an educated man. “Your tackle is only dangerous because you're heavy and fast. If I'd broken step I'd have faded through you. I made the mistake of trying to go through you on speed.”

  Bratian said this with a frank grin that Stephen liked. He made no attempt to conceal or minimize his background and by the end of the afternoon Stephen felt he knew all about it.

  That night in a friend's room, Stephen became the little man's champion. He claimed that Carl had more on the ball than the whole lot of them put together, and that if he didn't get into a club when his time came up it would be a damned crime. Carl had come up the hard way. He had read all sorts of books most freshmen had never heard of, and if he could get a little more weight on his ribs he'd make a smooth quarterback. He had taught himself to carry a ball by pegging down a straight row of stakes in a vacant lot in New York and spending hours a day, weeks a year, swerving through them and breaking pace as he went. As a result he had ankles like steel. He had learned to play tennis on public courts, but he had learned to play well by getting jobs as ballboy at famous courts where he could study the champions. To earn money he had done the usual variety of things, and in his last high-school year he had made almost enough to stake him through Princeton by driving trucks for a bootlegging syndicate, meeting vessels at obscure points along the Jersey coast, and running the liquor inland. He had been born in Rumania and had come to America at the age of five. His father had been a teacher of literature in the old country until he had been jailed for his politics and barred from teaching on his release. His mother was a Salonika woman, part Greek and part Syrian. In America, Carl's father had been very poor; his English was too weak for a white-collar job. He had supported himself by operating a one-room tailor shop on lower Tenth Avenue, where his wife did most of the work. His name was not Bratian, but Bratianu, and his son had been baptized Carol, not Carl.

  Some time during their first winter in Princeton, Stephen made the discovery that Carl despised athletics and naturally wanted to know why he worked so hard at them. Carl had his answer.

  “In this country people trust an athlete. Anyone with a face like mine needs all the trust he can get. Years from now when I say I was on the Princeton team in 1925 or 1926 people will relax.”

  Stephen's friendship was a great help to Bratian at Princeton. Though it failed to get him into a club, it helped make him acquainted with a variety of men who otherwise would never have bothered speaking to him. Soon Bratian had a certain following, and word got around that he was a useful man to know. When the left end of the team thought he had made a professor's daughter pregnant, Bratian knew exactly what to do and told him the name of a druggist who would fill the necessary prescription. A few days later when the football player reported in desperation that he had walked the girl nearly unconscious all the way to Penn's Neck and back in the rain, and still nothing had happened, Carl produced the name of a doctor in New York who would handle the case for three hundred dollars. “He's absolutely the best man. He has every European degree known to medicine and he's making a cool fifty thousand right now. The stockbrokers go to him.”

  But there were other sides to Bratian. He was one of the few undergraduates in Princeton at that time whom the professors willingly admitted was in search of a liberal education. He majored in history and studied psychology, economics, and a little biology on the side. Though the professors respected his work, none of them liked him, for quite literally he knew too much. He was aware of all the campus intrigues, and though he was always polite, he contrived to give them the feeling that he did not take them seriously.

  “That man Bratian,” one of them said to a colleague, “studies history as if it were something useful. What does he think he'll do – make money out of it?”

  One evening after they had been drinking applejack in Stephen's room, Bratian discovered a loose button on the sleeve of his jacket. He jerked it free and put it into his pocket, and the action seemed to remind him of his parents.

  “My father's sitting on the doorstep in Tenth Avenue right now, probably with a bunch of kids around him. He loves everybody. The kids are there and he's telling them stories. They're afraid to go home because their old man is drunk, or their old lady is grinding it out with some bastard who'll give her two bucks toward the rent money, but my old man isn't thinking about any of that. He's just sitting there looking like Toscanini and telling stori
es to the kids.” Bratian knocked a book on the floor with his elbow and didn't bother to pick it up. “Do you know why they all love him, Steve?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he's gentle. Because they know they can kick him in the teeth and he'll only be sorry for them because they were such bastards they wanted to do it.”

  Stephen said nothing, embarrassed and awkward. He picked up the book and replaced it on the table.

  “And here am I,” Bratian said. “Me – that grew up looking at red brick tenements and smelling cooking grease, onions, and the vomit left by drunks on the staircase Saturday nights that nobody cleaned up till Monday morning. And my father was a professor once. He hasn't learned yet he's nothing but a Wop.” Bratian laughed softly. “He worries about America. He worries for fear democracy isn't going to turn out quite so wonderful as he thought it would when he was in Rumania. Him – worried about America! Why don't you laugh?”

  Stephen did not feel like laughing.

  “But my mother,” Bratian went on, “doesn't worry about anything so big. She never knew how to read or write till my father taught her. She's not good-looking and never was. But if she'd been the wife of a merchant, that merchant would have made a million dollars. If she'd been a queen down in the Balkans, her country would never have had a revolution. Every night when I'd be studying I'd feel her eyes on me. She'd be sewing. She worked all the time when she was awake, but she always knew whether I was concentrating or not. Sometimes I'd hear her move and look up and find a glass of milk beside me. It was her milk and she needed it badly, for she starved when she was a girl and her lungs were none too good. I'd protest and try to make her drink it herself but she'd look at me like steel and say, ‘Do what you're told.’ And I'd drink it. It was me she bothered about. She let my brother hang around the poolrooms till he became a two-bit crook, and she knew my sister was being jazzed by half the neighbourhood cats by the time she was fifteen. She let them go strictly to hell their own way because she knew there's nothing you can do with stupid people. But she never took her eyes off me, not once. She never told me not to become like my father. She didn't have to. Don't get me wrong – she didn't despise my father. She loved him. She had a heart ten times the size of her body. But her brain weighed more than even her heart did. She knew my father was a saint and there's nothing anybody can do about a saint. But she knew I wasn't a saint and that I had – in one part of my brain – some of the cogs that made my old man click the way he did. She wasn't going to let my ideas make a monkey out of me.”