The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Nina remembered Bruce and frowned. He'd simply have to understand that this was something special.

  “Why yes, we always have a dance on Wednesday night in July and August.”

  There was another pause, and Nina wondered why an American of Lassiter's age from New York – she had always assumed he was from New York – should take so long to get to the point.

  “The late afternoon is a bad time to call a girl, isn't it?” Lassiter said thoughtfully. “You might be having tea, or something.”

  “Oh, no,” Nina said quickly. “I was out in the garden with Lucy.”

  There was another pause.

  “I dropped in at the library today, but I didn't find either of you there.”

  “Jane was there today. She's my other sister.”

  She heard another chuckle over the wire. “That means Lucy's home now, then?”

  “Yes, of course. Lucy's nearly always home.”

  “Do you mind if I speak to her?”

  Nina had been growing increasingly puzzled and now she was too amazed to speak. Then a flush touched her cheeks as the idea struck her that he had been amusing himself at her expense all along.

  “She's very busy,” she said crisply. “Perhaps I could take a message?”

  “Thanks just the same. I don't want to trouble you. I'd like to speak to her personally.”

  Nina's cheeks were still warm as she went through the house to the garden. “You're wanted on the phone,” she called from the back steps.

  Lucy took off her garden gloves and dropped them by the basket she had just filled with veronica and white lavender.

  “Who is it, do you know?”

  Nina gave her a sharp glance as she passed her at the foot of the steps. “I have no doubt he'll tell you himself.”

  A few minutes later Lucy left the telephone. Without looking over her shoulder to see if Nina was in the hall, she went out the front door and wandered down the road to the common. Mothers were there with their children and bathers were lying on the beach in the late afternoon sun. A radio in a car parked at the end of the road was blaring something about Hitler. In her confusion Lucy felt exposed to them all; her embarrassed excitement had no place to hide. She walked back to the house and through the hall to the kitchen where everything was cool, sunless, and clear. The nickel-plated alarm clock ticked on its shelf above the tins containing sugar, flour, coffee, and tea. The time was five-fifteen.

  Forgetting about the flowers she had left in the garden, she struck a match to light the oven, then set a bowl and bread pan on the table, opened the door of the ice-box, and removed eggs, milk, and the minced beef and pork she was going to make into a meat-loaf for supper. From a vegetable pan she took parsley and onions, and assembled her materials together on the table. Then with a quick spontaneous movement she stretched both arms over her head and smiled.

  The loaf was mixed and in the pan when she heard the front door slam and Nina's footsteps coming down the hall.

  “Here you are! I've been looking all over the place for you.”

  Lucy pulled open the oven door, looked at the thermometer inside, put the pan on the top shelf, and closed the door again.

  “Nina, would you like to set the table? I have some other things to do.”

  Nina stood watching her with narrowed eyes, her hands on her hips, and all the mysterious antagonism she felt against her sister showing in her face.

  “I know perfectly well who it was, you know.”

  “Nobody said you didn't.”

  “What did he want you for?”

  Lucy looked at Nina's face, and wondered why her sister was angry. Expecting mockery, she was astonished to discover this new mood. Then Nina stamped her foot on the floor like a child.

  “Can't you ever tell me anything? Why do you have to be so secretive? Living with you, day in and day out, is like is like – How long have you known him, anyway?”

  An expression entered Lucy's eyes that Nina had never seen before. “Aren't you making a fool of yourself?” Lucy said.

  “A fool of myself?”

  Still facing her sister, her eyes quietly watching, Lucy said, “You're not a child any more, and it's time you got over these tantrums. It's also time you realized there are moments when I'd prefer you to mind your own business. He asked me to go to the dance tonight.”

  The clock ticked loudly in the ensuing silence. Nina's mouth was open and her china-blue eyes were staring incredulously. Then anger replaced surprise. Then mockery veiled the anger. Finally an expression almost of alarm covered her whole face and she looked like a little girl who has just been told there is no Santa Claus.

  “You said no, of course!”

  “I said yes.”

  Nina walked to the door, but she was unable to make her retreat in good order and turned around.

  “Well, I suppose you know what people will say. A girl like you, who never goes anywhere – suddenly appearing at a dance with a man like that! Nobody knows anything about him – I suppose you're aware of that. For all we know he may be married and the father of goodness knows how many children! It stands to reason he is, for he's dreadfully old and – and – Lucy, did you really say yes?”

  Nina was still in the doorway as Lucy passed her quietly and went into the hall.

  “What do you think Jane will say?”

  Lucy went upstairs without answering.

  But Jane had nothing to say to Lucy that evening. Shortly before six o'clock she telephoned that she was having supper with Dr. and Mrs. Grant at the manse and would go on to choir practice later. So Lucy and Nina passed a strained half-hour eating alone with each other.

  After the dishes were cleared, when Lucy went upstairs to dress, she began to feel foolish and panic-stricken. For a moment she would have done almost anything to escape the evening that lay before her and she remembered with an agony of mortification an experience she had once had at college.

  In her freshman philosophy class there had been a man called Hardison from Montreal; a rare type for Dufferin College, his face dark with a quality of precocious maturity and weary handsomeness that made him seem to the others like a foreigner. Unlike them, he had plenty of money to spend and drove his own car, and he was understood to have been cashiered from Royal Military College the year previous.

  Both Hardison and Lucy sat in the back of the philosophy class, where he passed most of the early lectures with closed eyes. Then Lucy became aware that he often watched her, and she wondered why, though she gave it little attention. After several weeks, when he suddenly invited her to the second formal dance of the year, she was too surprised to refuse and afterwards was too embarrassed to mention his name even to the girls she knew best. Hardison had avoided the college girls all that term, and they believed he sought his pleasures elsewhere.

  The memory of the night of the dance had lingered with Lucy through the years like a torment. Hardison had come to the women's residence, suave, poised, and bored among the other students who stared at him surreptitiously and wondered what girl had been bold enough to go out with such a man. When Lucy came downstairs to join him she could smell whiskey on his breath. As they drove to the dance in his car he informed her that she was the only good-looking girl he had seen at Dufferin, offered her a drink from his flask, and showed contempt when she refused. After a few dances he neglected her, went down to the basement of the gymnasium where the dance was being held, and kept coming up with the smell of whiskey still stronger on his breath. When he finally drove her home, his boredom had become so obvious that he hardly bothered to speak to her at all, and in the main street of the town he crashed head-on into a parked truck. Neither of them was hurt, but Hardison's car had to be towed to the garage by a wrecker, a policeman took names, and the dance had been over an hour and a half before Lucy got back to the residence.

  It was useless for Lucy, in later years, to tell herself that the matron had been stupid and tactless to use this incident as a means of rubbing a moral less
on into a girl like herself. The humiliation rankled. The whole evening had been so horribly unpleasant that she felt a shudder of shame every time she remembered it.

  Now, alone in her room, she felt the recurring shame again. There was not a single party or dance in her life that she could recall with pleasure. She told herself that this evening with Lassiter would be even more unpleasant than the few dances she had gone to years ago, because now it was so long since she had danced with anyone that she was sure she had forgotten how to follow a man's lead. For a moment she thought of going to the telephone to cancel the engagement. Then she realized she had no idea where to find him. There were two hotels in the town and several rooming houses. For all she knew, Lassiter might even be staying with the Craigs.

  Hesitating, she caught sight of herself in the mirror over the dressing table, and her face took her by surprise, as people's faces sometimes do when they catch in the mirror the reflection of an expression they had never guessed was there. She realized that the years had not been unkind to her. The expression she saw was a mature one and the agonies of shyness she could still feel were not so visible now. She smiled involuntarily, and as she did so she realized that Lassiter might be neither insincere nor foolish. What she saw in the glass was the reflection of an attractive woman.

  Thinking this, she remembered the feline power of Lassiter's movements on the tennis court, and then the frankness of his smile when they had met in the library. She remembered Matt McCunn telling her she ought to escape from Grenville before it was too late. And as she made her decision a quick vibration of life stirred through her body.

  She began to dress, decided to wear the blue dinner gown Nina had tried to take away from her, made a few experiments with her hair, and finally brushed it smooth and left it plain. As she manicured her nails she had a moment's fear that her work in the garden had left the skin of her hands too rough for delicacy. But after she had rubbed oil into them, they felt smooth as satin as she touched them to her cheeks.

  Through the window came the sound of the town clock striking eight times. Another half-hour remained; another half hour of security. The whole house was still when she opened her door into the hall, and the air in the hall had the warm, delicately musty odour the house always acquired toward the end of a humid summer. A faint splash from the bathroom told her that Nina was lounging in the tub. She went downstairs and out to the kitchen, put away a few pots and pans, picked up a cloth, and went into the living room to dust the tables. There was still twenty minutes left. She sat on the piano stool and began to play quietly to herself. Then, as the movement bore her along, her mounting confidence made the chords fill the house and her fingers struck the keys with hardly a mistake, It was only when she reached the end that she recalled, half ruefully, that what she had played was Jane's favourite composition, the adagio of the Apassionata. She thought of Jane and wondered what her elder sister would say in the morning, then forgot all about her when a car door slammed outside and she knew that Lassiter had arrived.

  IT WAS only months afterwards that Lucy was able to sort out in her mind the pattern which developed in the hours and days after Lassiter invited her to the dance. Months afterwards she could tell herself what at the time she did not know: that there is nothing unique in the fact that the least probable men and women attach themselves to one another and that time and place are more selective than we ourselves know how to be. People can join as much by random chance as the grains of pollen which meet in the air.

  Later on Lucy knew this. Later on she knew also that she had been much less cut off from the world than she had imagined, for Lassiter soon stopped seeming strange to her. Even his maleness became familiar, as though she had always been accustomed to men. By accepting her as a woman he showed her she was like other women after all, and like them desirable. Her world staggered and moved, but she moved with it. After that August night in Grenville, Lucy never felt herself a spectator again.

  But at the time, the small things that counted poured by too rapidly for her comprehension. Time had to pass before she could realize that it was this particular look in the eyes, or this touch of the hand, or this tone in a voice used carelessly which changed their personal histories beyond any plans they made or fears they guarded. Time had to pass, too, before she understood how much Lassiter took for granted, how much his natural self-confidence took the place of reflection, his physical strength of calculation. At first she listened for hidden overtones which were not there at all. He was lonely for a woman and he had found her. Then he liked her and then he wanted her; soon he told her he loved her. Lassiter moved toward Lucy with little consciousness of what he was doing. And Lucy, who was accustomed to question herself and reflect about everything, had nothing on which to rely but her own instincts.

  The dance that night passed as summer dances usually did in Grenville. Girls and boys in their late teens and a few couples in their early twenties mingled with some visitors from out of town and circled about the floor in the plain, pine-boarded hall of the Grenville Boat Club to the music of the Dixie Moonlanders. The club was not situated on Lake Ontario, but on a small stretch of water two miles inland called Granite Mere. Birch trees stood about its shores and an outcropping of lichen-covered granite formed a small cliff at one end of it. A nine-hole golf course followed the curve of the lake from the clubhouse, climbed the high ground, and disappeared on the other side.

  “I can't get over the feeling that I'm a kid again.”

  In the half darkness on the gallery Lassiter's teeth showed white as he smiled. He and Lucy were sitting on the railing overhanging the water. Farther down the railing Nina and Bruce Fraser stood apart and apparently they were having an argument. Lucy knew that Nina was furious with Bruce for having previously argued with Lassiter on the state of the world, and that Bruce was angry because the amused tolerance of Lassiter's answers had only served to emphasize the difference in age and position between them. But Lucy herself, now that it was after eleven o'clock, was relaxed and almost happy. So far, the evening had gone off far better than she had hoped. Being in this little club was like being in a strange place in a strange town, for she knew hardly any of the people here. They were all too young, and she realized with some amazement that during the years since she had left college a whole new generation of children had grown into their late teens. Most of them probably knew who she was, but nothing she would do could possibly be of interest to them.

  Apparently in Lassiter the evening had roused feelings of nostalgia. He had been talking about boyhood summer holidays on Nantucket, about tennis and sailing races, and had made a long story out of the first night he had got drunk.

  Now he said, “I can't get over the idea of being here with all these kids and liking it. I didn't know it was a high-school dance I was asking you to. I hope you don't mind. And this band – to assemble a band as corny as that takes genius. Each instrument gives out exactly the same kind of corn at exactly the same time.”

  All evening Lucy had been following remarks like this with a diligent silence which made Lassiter assume that they shared the same frame of reference. He went on to talk about Dorsey and Goodman and Beiderbecke and then came back to the Dixie Moonlanders.

  “It reminds me of an outfit called The Hot Sophomores I used to dance to when I was fourteen. That guy on the traps – my God, he even keeps the same old red light burning inside his bass drum. Is his name really Blackman, or did he make it up?”

  The lighted windows of the clubhouse made paths on the dark water of the lake, and occasionally a canoe glided into the lights and out into darkness again. A boy of about twenty approached Lassiter and asked for a light. Lassiter handed over a book of matches, and as they exchanged a few words Lucy realized that they knew each other. The boy thanked him, calling him ‘sir,’ and went away.

  Lassiter turned back to her. “One thing the Depression has done – it's given an outfit like the Ceramic better men than it deserves for the kind of jobs it offers. Th
at kid's only a clerk at sixteen a week. He ought to be getting twice that.”

  The lights in the hall were dimmed until the paths they made on the water faded out. Softly, with all the rubato dreaminess a small-town band can put into a sweet number, the strains of “Chloe” throbbed through the opened doors and windows into the night.

  “I can't believe it,” Lassiter murmured. “It's a real, old-fashioned moonlight waltz.” He reached over and took her hand. “I haven't danced one of these numbers in years. Have you?” He flicked his cigarette into the lake and continued talking as they walked to the floor. “Time was all you needed was a darkened room. Where I've been lately liquor is not only quicker, it's essential.”

  In the half-darkness Lucy really danced with him for the first time that evening. He was easy to follow. He held her close and firmly, and there was no subtlety in his steps. Now, relaxing and forgetting herself, she allowed her instinctive rhythms to match his, she felt her slim body melting into the direct power of his movements, she turned and swayed with him, and for a few moments it seemed as if the walls which had surrounded her for so long had parted like cobwebs and left her free. Long before tonight, her imagination had been sufficient to let her picture herself in various characters, provided she was alone. But she knew, as she swayed with Lassiter to the beat of Ike Blackman's drums, that from now on she would never seem to others precisely as she had seemed before. She felt his chin pressing her temple, and did not withdraw her head.

  Then, as they turned through the glow of light spread by Blackman's bass drum, she saw Nina in the middle of the floor, watching them while she danced slowly with Bruce. Lucy stiffened involuntarily.

  “What's the matter?”

  Lassiter, head held back, was looking down at her. Then he turned with the music and Nina disappeared behind him. Safe in the half darkness, Lucy looked up and held his eyes, and felt grateful to him. His hand pressed more firmly on the small of her back.

  “How did I manage to find you? You're lovely. Look at me more often like that.”