The music stopped and she turned in some embarrassment toward the door, guessing that he was a man who found it easy to say such things. Nina was standing in the doorway with Bruce as they passed; her eyes were not so much mocking as amazed. Sentences were exchanged between them. Lucy was aware of Bruce's voice speaking to her.
“May I have the next dance?” And to Lassiter, “Do you mind?”
“Sorry, Bruce,” Lassiter grinned. “How about making it the dance after that? I've already booked her for the next one.”
Then, his hand on the soft flesh of her inner arm just below the elbow, Lassiter guided her out to the gallery. They sat on the railing again and he lit a cigarette.
“Let's not dance any more. Let's drive.”
A small breeze puffed off the lake and Lucy shivered slightly.
“Are you cold?”
“A little. I left my wrap on the chair over there.”
“I'll get it.”
He came back and put it over her shoulders and stood looking down, large, massive, and confident, one arm propped against a post which ran from the railing to the gallery roof. The music began for the next dance. Nina and Bruce went in to the floor and Lucy's eyes followed them.
“My car has just been tuned up,” Lassiter said. “It really moves. How would you like to drive to Toronto and back?”
His boyish eagerness was oddly comforting to her; all evening his naturalness had been increasing her confidence. She held her watch against the light and saw it was half-past eleven.
“Don't tell me it's late,” he said. “I can remember when my evenings were just beginning at one in the morning. Lassiter has deteriorated since then, but time was he could take it. Come along, Lucy. This band is too bad to dance to.”
She saw the stars glimmering in the lake. “I don't think so.”
He was insistent. “That's no reason at all.”
For a while he argued the point, but Lucy remained sitting where she was. Finally he said, “Well anyway, let's take a stroll. I'm restless as hell. Normally this would be the time for a drink, but I've been in this country long enough to know you can never get a drink when you want one.”
She strolled down the gallery with him and they stood for a few moments on the steps watching a quarter moon setting over the slope of the links. The night was alive with humming insects. A car door slammed and a girl and a boy emerged and came up the steps arm in arm. Lassiter put his arm through hers and they strolled out through the parking space toward the grass. A match flickered in the rear seat of a Chevrolet, a boy's head appeared for an instant in its glow, a girl's hair and forehead, a puffed cigarette, and then darkness. As they moved out onto the putting green he slipped his arm about her waist. She let it rest there for a moment and then drew away.
“We'd better be going back.”
He turned toward her. “I wish it were light enough for me to see your face.”
“Why?”
“Then I'd know whether you meant what you said.” As she said nothing, he continued. “This has been a wonderful evening for me, Lucy. I can't tell you what it's meant. Someone like you is so rare these days I can't quite believe you're real.”
Instinctively she rallied to protect herself, not knowing what she was protecting herself against.
“Please don't say foolish things like that when you know they aren't true.”
As she moved away from him to the steps she wished her mind could keep up with the mercurial lightness of her feelings. She wished she could give out a sense of smiling with the motions of her body, as Nina did when she was gay.
Lassiter caught up with her and again slipped his arm through hers. “No,” he said, “this isn't a line. I don't know how to say it, but tonight – you've made me feel happy tonight, that's all.”
“I'm glad.”
“An aunt of mine used to say that an air of repose is the mark of a great lady. I used to think it was a comical remark. Now I know it's true.”
She had no answer. What his words involved, the mere fact that he had said them, dazed her.
They returned to the hall and she danced with him again. Then Bruce came up to claim a dance and Lassiter sat out with Nina on the balcony rail. Bruce was surprisingly shy with her, and she realized with startling awareness that a man and a woman can never really know each other until they have touched each other's bodies. She could feel the repressed tension in Bruce and knew he wanted to hold her more closely than he was doing.
“You're looking very nice tonight, Lucy.”
The odd formality of his remark made her feel older and almost protective and for an instant she wanted to touch his hair out of pure affection and tell him how much she had always liked him. But the music stopped before she could think of anything to say, Blackman struck the cymbal with his stick, and everyone stood at attention wherever they happened to be while the band played “God Save the King.” She and Bruce walked together out to the gallery where they found Lassiter leaning against a post smoking a cigarette and looking at the water, while beside him Nina looked restless and discontented.
“Perhaps Nina and Bruce could come in the car with us?” she said.
A shade of displeasure crossed Lassiter's face, but he could find no courteous reason for refusing, and said he'd be glad to have them if they didn't mind being crowded. Nina and Bruce thanked him and went inside to the chair where Nina had left her coat and bag.
As Lassiter slipped the wrap about Lucy's shoulders, he said, “I want to see you again tomorrow night. Please don't say no.”
For a moment they were alone on their section of the porch and she met his eyes with undenied intimacy. “I don't know, Stephen. I don't know if I can.”
Nina and Bruce returned and Lassiter let them pass ahead down the gallery.
He nodded toward Nina's back and whispered, “Is she the trouble?”
“No.”
“I'll call you up tomorrow, anyway. This is one of those things that happens, and we both know it.”
But as Lucy drove home with him in the crowded car, all of them silent, she wondered if something really had happened, and if they both did know it. Now that the dance was over, she could think only of the embarrassment she was going to feel when she found herself alone again with Nina and Jane.
Afterwards, in her room in the silent house, she lay awake for a long time. There had been no obvious embarrassment with Nina or Jane and neither had made any comment when the house door had closed and Lassiter had driven away. Trying to put herself in their place, she wondered what comment they could have found to make. But words had never mattered much in this house.
Toward dawn a light breeze sprang off the lake, and Lucy fell into a broken sleep in which Lassiter was present in strange forms and repeatedly woke her up. Then, wide awake, she saw him as she had seen him a few hours ago. She tried to guess what the whole of him meant: how much the tenderness in his brown eyes cancelled the hint of hardness about the mouth, how his mature self-confidence balanced the boyishness which made him seem at times more naive than she had ever felt herself to be. But the calculations all faded out. She remembered the touch of his fingers on the soft flesh of her inner arm and the driving rhythm of his body as he danced. Lucy discovered she was a stranger to herself.
BREAKFAST the next morning was a strained agony for Lucy, for it was one of Jane's talents to create at will an atmosphere in which everyone around her felt guilty. She did this without sulking and without uttering a single direct word of rebuke. Such an atmosphere she built up all through the meal. When Lucy was clearing the table Jane remained behind.
“I must say,” Jane said mildly, “I was surprised to find the house empty when I returned from Dr. Grant's. It was a lucky thing I had my own key. I think you might have told me you were going out.”
Lucy paused with the tray in her hands. “I'm sorry, Jane. I left you a note. You found it, didn't you?”
“Where did you meet this Mr. Lassiter?” Jane was not smiling, but he
r voice was pleasant enough.
“I met him in the library.” Lucy let the tray down gently on the table. “Mrs. Craig knows him well, you know.”
“Was it Mrs. Craig who introduced you to him?”
Lucy's humiliation mounted as she felt herself driven into a downright lie. “Yes.”
Jane rose from the table. “I must say it seems very odd for you to go to a dance with a man you've only met once. It's not like you to want to go to a party like that.”
Lucy felt herself flushing. “I don't know why.”
“Lucy,” Jane said pleasantly, “please don't pretend you don't understand what I mean. People know you aren't like ordinary girls and it attracts attention when you behave in an ordinary way. It makes us look cheap. People have always respected the way we live. Father had few friends, but you know he was the most respected man in Grenville.” She smiled. “Well, I suppose it doesn't really matter. Nina is only a child, and people probably thought you were chaperoning her and Bruce. And of course, it won't happen again.”
Lucy left the room, bitter with humiliation. When Lassiter telephoned at twelve-thirty, asking her to go out for the evening, she said she would.
He arrived just before sunset, to find her standing by the perennial border in front of the house. She came quickly over the lawn and slipped into the car before he could get out to open the door. Looking past her toward the house, he saw one of the white curtains in the living room lift slightly at the corner, then fall back into place. Lucy hadn't noticed and he made no mention of it to her, but he thought about it as he sensed her relief when the car left Matilda Lane and reached the highway.
The evening was still bright as they drove out King Street on the Toronto highway. The loafers were out in front of the drugstore and the street had the empty, wistful, waiting aspect of all small-town main streets in a wide country on a summer evening when there is nothing to do but wait for the next day and watch the cars and trucks pass through on their way from one city to the next.
“The other evening I saw a fox,” Lassiter said. “It was practically inside the town. I was walking out beyond where the streets end.”
“They sometimes come in from the country. I have an uncle who lives on the edge of town. When he kept a cat he used to be afraid of them.”
They rounded a hairpin bend that took them between a filling station and the largest oak in the township. There was a legend that a man had been hanged from it a hundred and twenty years ago for stealing a horse. Lassiter began to talk about Bruce and Nina.
“I liked both those kids, though neither of them seemed to know it. I know why I bothered Nina, but I can't figure Fraser out at all. That boy isn't as meek and mild as he looks. Inside, he boils. Maybe with the right training he could be tough. What's the matter with him, anyway? I think he's got ability if he'd use it.”
“He has.”
“This whole town's got ability. There's a real quality about it. But you all think too small. You could never be dangerous. You see a small town in the United States, in the South or the Middle West I mean, and the people are crude compared to you people here. But they can be dangerous. You can never be sure what they might do.”
On the open road he pressed with his foot and the car surged forward at sixty-five miles an hour. For Lassiter, this was a comfortable cruising speed. Lucy sank deep into the seat to prevent the slipstream from whipping her hair. She glanced at the outline of his head, saw the lines strongly marked about his mouth, his lips rather full but firm and solid, and the little furrows of concentration about his eyes as he stared at the road. She wondered what on earth a man like this found in her to make him want to be with her. She realized that if she were a man she would probably resent him as Bruce did. Stephen Lassiter and Bruce Fraser could meet anywhere and know instinctively they were on opposite sides of whatever there was to be on opposite sides of. They were on opposite sides as human beings.
“How did you and Nina manage to grow up in the same family?”
“I've often wondered.”
“Is she jealous of you? Maybe not. She's a nice girl. She'll be swell when she gets older. I've always loved little girls like that. They flatter my sense of power.”
“Perhaps you flatter theirs?”
“I wonder if that's why pint-sized women have been taking advantage of me ever since I can remember? They think all I've got is size. Hell, this is a lousy road.” He slackened his speed, dropped his hand from the wheel, found Lucy's on the seat beside him, and clasped it firmly. “All the same, it must be all right having a sister like Nina. My own sister is a first-class bitch. It must be nice having a family, too. Apart from my sister, all I have now is a lot of stuffy relatives I never see. It gets bleak, living alone.”
Lucy breathed deeply, with a quiet sigh in the wind. A weight seemed to slide off her mind. She half-closed her eyes against the sun, for it was poised ahead of them on the end of the road like a soft round ball. Already the fields on their right were losing colour, and on the left the plane of the lake was as pale as the inside of a poplar leaf.
“This is good country,” he said.
“It's the only country I know.”
“Even the fields look respectable.”
“Are we as dull as all that?”
“I wouldn't say you were dull. You're just slow starting.” His hand left hers, took his pipe from his pocket, and put it empty between his teeth, the car still running slowly and as quiet as a whisper. “I've always had a feel for country, ever since I was a kid. I think I like country better than people. North of here they tell me it gets wild.”
“It's just bush. The bush goes to the tundra and the tundra goes to the Arctic Ocean.”
“But it's a safe kind of wildness, isn't it? No lions or tigers. No snakes.” He looked sideways at her, caught a brief glimpse of her profile, and was stirred to go on, to dramatize the difference he felt between them. “It makes a difference if a country is safe. Back home – in the South or even in parts of New York and New Jersey – you go bird shooting. There's always the chance of a poisonous snake. It's not a thing you talk about or even think about and you can go all your life and perhaps never see one. But the fear is underneath your mind all the time, and when you go through a swamp in the South or maybe through brambles on shaly ground in the Ramapos you remember it. There's nothing like that here that I know of. Snake-countries are usually cruel countries…”
“Germany isn't a snake-country.”
“You think of too many things at once.”
She laughed. “Well, not far from here there's an island with more snakes to the acre than any place in the world.”
“Are you kidding?”
“But they're not dangerous.”
“Even when they aren't dangerous, I hate them.”
He spurted around a truck, the car picking up so fast it seemed to kick Lucy in the back, flashed into the diminishing space between the truck's left fender and an approaching car, then slackened off again.
“I'd like to see this country get stirred up about something to find out what goes on underneath. Because a lot must go on. Jim Craig told me how many of your people were killed in the war. A thing like that means something. Myself, I like a dramatic country, and most of the United States is dramatic. There's something crazy and dangerous about it, but it makes you feel alive. You can get into the deadest town – so long as it's west of the Appalachians or south of the Mason-Dixon – and you can imagine anything happening in it. My father came from a tank town in the plains, but he saw his own father help string up a rustler. Up here I bet you never had any rustlers to string up. Down in the South you can go along a little dirt road and there's nothing to see in the day time. But at night you go along it. You can pretty easily imagine a lynching party, if you're in the right district of the right state. And you ought to see the Middle West in a fall thunderstorm. No wonder the small-town people in the Middle West have that strained look about their eyes. People here haven't got it. But
you're not soft, either. I've found out you don't dent easily. You're just different – as if you'd never got started, somehow. You don't make the money you should because you don't think big enough. You're too content to take what people give you. You're too polite.” He stopped abruptly. “And Lassiter seems to be talking a hell of a lot.”
She protested that he was not; and then she was reminded of Bruce Fraser, who also talked a lot, and she wondered if there was some quality in herself which made both these men want to shock a response out of her.
“I never thought about Canada before I came up here,” Lassiter said. “And when I did come, I found all of you looking down on Americans.”
“We don't.”
“The hell you don't!”
“Well, perhaps its an old habit we got into.”
“Is it because you're British and the British look down on everybody?”
“They look down on us, too.”
“I'll bet they do.”
She marvelled at the silence of his car. It whispered along a road that was too narrow and pock-marked from thousands of patches where winter frosts had heaved the concrete. Lassiter drove by the feel of the machine as if he were a part of it. They idled through a small main street and when they came out on the other side it was so dark he turned on the lights.
“Does Nina think Bruce Fraser is in love with her?”
“I don't think so.”
“She'd better not, because he isn't. He likes you better.”
She smiled to herself, amazed at the thrill of joy these surprising words, one after the other, awoke in her.
“You don't know any of us very well, do you?”
“Well enough to know that,” he said. “I can't get him off my mind. He's a well-educated boy. Why the hell doesn't he get out of a town like Grenville?”
“He only lives here in the summers.”
“What does he do in the winters?”
She told him.
“Yes,” Lassiter said, “I might have known.”
Lucy bridled at his dismissal of Bruce. “Why shouldn't he be a schoolmaster if he wants to be?”
The Precipice Page 15
