She heard Jane's feet on the porch outside. “All right,” she said quickly. “I'll be there.”
His voice remained calm and solid. “That's wonderful. I know you will. One more thing – I know what a tough thing this is for you to have to do. But don't worry about it. Just keep busy till you get away.”
Jane's hand was turning the knob, but the parcel she was carrying fell to the floor and she stooped to pick it up.
His voice came over the wire, softer but strong with emotion. “Since I left Grenville I've only felt half alive. I love you and I want you – both together. That's straight and hard, and it's the truth.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know.”
She hung up as the door swung open and Jane entered the hall. Then she turned and went through the house to the garden, thinking she might avoid Jane by working there, thinking she might quiet the wildness in her nerves. The garden looked a ruin today, for yesterday she had cut down all the long stalks of the perennials and the debris lay thick on the beds and spilled over onto the edges of the lawn. Hours of work would be required to prepare the garden for the winter. The manure had to be laid on, the debris had to be carted to the compost heap, several dozen transplantings had to be made among the daisies and especially among the lilies which had massed so tightly they threatened to take over whole sections of the beds.
She picked up a rake and began to pull some of the debris clear of the beds into a pile on the grass. Then she dropped the rake and looked helplessly about her. The garden no longer mattered. After Monday it would not even be hers and all the work she had put into it would go to waste in the future. Inside a few years, weeds and the stronger plants would run wild all over the beds and Jane would never care, for flowers meant nothing to her. Then in sudden alarm Lucy remembered that it was already eleven o'clock; the bank would close within an hour.
She hurried into the house, spoke briefly to Jane, and left for King Street. In the bank she wrote out a check for two hundred dollars and cashed it. The money was handed through the wicket in crisp ten dollar bills, and they made a bulge when she folded them into her purse. As nearly as she could recollect, she still had about twenty dollars left in her account. It would at least serve to keep the account open.
As she left the bank, the thought that money had become so vitally important began to frighten her. She knew the value of a few dollars, but she had no idea of the value of money itself. Jane had her earnings and a backlog of ten thousand dollars in four-per-cent government bonds, all her father had been able to leave her. That capital of ten thousand had never been broken, but they had always spent the interest on it together. Every month since she could remember Jane had worked on a careful budget which they never exceeded. Now the time had come when Lucy would be entirely dependent on somebody of whose attitude toward money she knew nothing. The last fiction of her independence was going.
But she kept busy. She went into the best shop in King Street and spent an hour examining dresses and lingerie. They had little variety in Overstreet's, and she knew Stephen would insist on her buying new clothes in New York, but she would be ashamed to go to him with the few old clothes she had in the cupboard at home. She selected two dresses of plain material with a fairly good line. They did little for her, but she hoped they would be in good taste anywhere. There were no satin dressing gowns, and she had to be content with a lightweight blue flannel one. She looked at only one nightgown, a flesh-coloured filmy thing like a stylized version of a Greek chiton. It was expensive and rather an amazing article to find in a place like Overstreet's. The sales girl was a stranger to Lucy, but she looked envious when Lucy decided to buy it. She paid the girl and asked to have the parcels wrapped and put aside to be called for later in the day. In the shoe store and millinery shop she went through the same procedure, and by the time she was finished she had only sixty-seven dollars left of her original two hundred. She still needed a new coat and at least one good piece of luggage. She decided she could afford only the suitcase, and after buying it she had thirty-two dollars and a few cents left. By this time she was sure all the merchants in Grenville were telling each other that Lucy Cameron was acting very queer.
It was nearly one o'clock before she started home again. On the way she bought groceries for the weekend, as she had meant to do before the phone rang in the hall. Now her mind was working fast. On her way down Matilda Lane she saw Bruce wiping the dust off his friend's Ford in front of the Fraser house. She laid her basket of groceries on her own front step and joined him.
“Bruce, how long will you have the car?”
He looked up from the right front wheel and smiled at her. He was wearing a tweed jacket over grey flannel trousers.
“Till I go back to Toronto. Some time Monday afternoon.”
“Are you busy tomorrow?”
“I've got nothing to do at all tomorrow.” He recognized her quiet intensity, and his perception was comforting to her. Bruce had always sensed her moods.
“Is anything the matter?” he said.
She glanced over her shoulder before replying. “I'm leaving Grenville, Bruce. I desperately need your help.”
The duster dropped from his hand as he stood up. Once before she had seen him look at her like this. It had been the night of the dance when he had observed her with Lassiter and for the first time had found her attractive. Now he looked at her with deep fondness, quiet wonder, and great respect. He had understood.
“Yes,” she said, “I'm getting married.”
He reached forward impulsively and took both her hands in his. “I'm so glad, Lucy. I'll miss you terribly, but I'm still glad.” He continued to hold her hands and then suddenly he let her go. “What do you want me to do?”
“Could you drive me to the Montreal train tomorrow morning?”
“I'll drive you all the way to Montreal if you like.”
“No, just to the train. There's a question of luggage. I'll have two bags. Jane will be practising at the church after supper tonight. Would you mind putting my bags in the trunk of your car then?”
“You mean, you're not telling Jane?”
“No.”
“You ought to, Lucy.”
“When Jane comes back from church tomorrow she'll find a letter from me on the hall table. It's the only way, Bruce. Afterwards, when I'm married, perhaps she'll accept the situation. I don't know, I can't think that far ahead. Jane is very lonely, and lonely people are usually very soft or very hard. Jane is harder than you'll ever guess.”
He looked at her without speaking, and the fondness they felt for each other was recognized between them.
“I wasn't thinking of Jane,” he said, “I was thinking of you. I'd hate to see you do anything you'll be sorry for afterwards.”
In a flash she saw Bruce as he would be fifteen or twenty years from now: dignified, competent, and at the same time somewhat illusive, as imaginative people always are who finally come to trust completely in themselves.
“Sometimes you can't avoid doing things you'll be sorry for,” she said.
He put his hands in his pockets. “Let's take a walk,” he said.
They began to stroll down the road toward the common. She moved with him, her hands in the pockets of her skirt, and at the edge of the grass they stood side by side and looked out over the lake.
“Why do you have to go away like this?” he said. “You should be getting married in your own house with your friends around you. It's not natural to run away. It's not like you.”
“Stephen was divorced only a few days ago.” “Oh.”
The familiar lake shone in the sun, the air shone above it, blue the colour of infinity above and below.
“Have you any idea what kind of life you're heading for in the States?”
“No.”
“I wish you wouldn't do it,” he murmured between closed teeth.
“What kind of life do you think I've had here?”
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then he turned and
they both began moving slowly back to the road.
“Has Jane driven you to it?”
“I don't know, Bruce. Perhaps she has. Perhaps many things. I don't know.”
“I mean –” He forced the words out almost against his will – “Are you in love with him or are you marrying him just to get away from your sister?”
“I'm in love with him.”
Bruce stood still and she forced herself to meet his eyes. She had never liked him more than she liked him at this moment.
“It's not a thing I should try to explain. But he's the only person in the world who ever took it for granted that it was natural for me to fall in love like anyone else.”
Bruce looked away. “I know what you mean,” he said. “But why do so many of us have to go away before we can do what we want? We all protect ourselves too much. Look at you, Lucy – your family has always tried to protect you from everything – from depending on others, from having people talk about you, even from being noticed. And look what it's led to. Now you're running away into a kind of life that's the direct opposite of everything you've ever known.”
She wondered why Bruce's nature forced him to philosophize at such a moment. A form of protection, she supposed. He always tended to cloak his emotions under general ideas.
“I hope you'll be happy, Lucy.”
“You don't like Stephen, do you, Bruce?”
“I don't even know him. No, I don't like him. But if he makes you happy, I'll say it's the best thing he's ever done in his life. What I like least is the way he's making you run away from here to join him in a strange city. Why doesn't he come here and walk into your house and talk to Jane straight?”
She shook her head. “Stephen is doing this the only way it can be done. You don't know Jane. You don't know me, either. If Stephen came here –” She turned from him and began to move up the walk to her own front door. “I prefer it this way.” A softer expression touched her face. “Will you speak to Jane after I leave?”
“If you want me to.”
“Tell her I'll always be thinking of her. Tell her I'll always be grateful for so many things she did. Tell her I'll want to come back and see her if she'll let me. And one other thing. You still have your old camera, haven't you?”
“Yes.”
“Take a snap of her in the garden some time and send it to me. You know, Jane has never had her picture taken once in her life.”
As they reached the Cameron front door he kissed her with a quick, fierce longing, then turned without a word and walked back to his own house. Lucy went inside and carried the groceries to the kitchen. She remembered the garden, and decided that if she worked for three hours this afternoon she could at least clear away the debris and scatter the bone meal over the beds. The lilies would have to be left to multiply and choke the more sensitive plants, but at least when she went away the garden would look cared-for and trim.
THE plane lifted from St. Hubert and circled, the field dropped below them, the land spreading flat as a saucer southward toward the United States, north to the St. Lawrence. Montreal slid into view in brilliantly clear sunshine, grain elevators and docks, church steeples and domes, factory chimneys and streets, thousands of acres of masonry crowded about the whaleback of Mount Royal. The plane headed south as the city and river dropped behind. It gained altitude, it kicked upward under their seats and dropped them as they hit the first bumps over the Green Mountains in Vermont.
Lucy looked at Lassiter's profile beside her. He was smiling, confident, and happy, his hand holding hers. Some of his confidence infected her, and she pressed his hand and looked up at him and smiled too. Nothing was pleasing him more than the speed with which he was effecting the transformation in her life. He leaned sideways in his seat and kissed her ear, and an elderly American businessman in the seat opposite gave them a friendly grin.
The plane roared south, the sun glinting on its wings, the roar of its engines loud in her ears, killing memory like an anaesthetic. Occasionally she looked out the window and saw the vast shadows of wandering cumulus clouds shifting slowly in the mountains. She saw lakes and a road and tiny moving dots on the road, and her stomach heaved for a moment as they dropped down to Burlington. They took off again and continued. After a while the Hudson was below them, and then New York rose in confusion over the earth-curve and they began the final descent. They crossed the river, there was a brief swirling vista of a sea, of giant buildings, docks, ships, chimneys, factories, canals, and more cities looming under a thin haze of smoke, and then they settled over the Newark airport and taxied to a stop. They transferred immediately to a small plane and flew to an airfield on the outskirts of Wilmington. There a taxicab was waiting to drive them to Elkton, Maryland, where they were married.
Lucy's ears were still deaf from the roaring motor of the little plane which flew them back to Newark when Carl Bratian joined them as they walked off the field. She recognized him at once, the man who had been playing tennis with Stephen that first day she had seen them both in Grenville.
His eyes ran over her in quick appraisal. He saw a slim girl so unobtrusively dressed that he decided her principal motive in buying clothes was to look as little different from other women as she could. The light top-coat she wore made it impossible for him to estimate her figure. She met the glance of his quick, penetrating eyes, and his wide mouth broke into a frank smile under his big nose. Then he went around to the back of the car while the luggage was being stowed in the trunk of his Cadillac. After tipping the porter, he followed Lassiter to the front and got in behind the wheel.
“Ever come into New York from Jersey before?” he asked her.
She told him it was the first time she had ever been in the United States.
“Well,” he said, “prepare yourself.”
They drove off the airport and joined the flood of traffic curving up to the skyway and then moved with the stream over the marshes, factories, and garbage heaps in toward Manhattan. It was a moment Lassiter had been waiting for ever since leaving Montreal.
“Look at it!” he said, indicating the skyline across the river. “What I'd give to be seeing that for the first time!”
But to Lucy the whole Jersey side of the river seemed like a revolving nightmare as they followed the curve of the skyway. She smiled, unable to speak. Cars and trucks in double lines poured in and out of New York, the traffic of a dozen King's Highways driving with direct, imperious, and almost brutal force, driving over a fantastic ribbon of concrete that led past the belching lips of factory chimneys, over canals, actual cities large enough to house the populace of a small nation.
Lassiter touched her elbow and pointed. “Look!”
For one second in the far distance she saw uptown New York emerging like a desert mirage through the smoke, the smoke tinged with gold, holding the group of skyscrapers immobile and unreal, dwarfing them as each of them dwarfed the other, yet combining to create a unity more magically and incredibly beautiful than she had guessed any city could ever be.
Lassiter was saying, “Let's take a bus up Fifth and ride on the top. We'll have time before it gets dark. We should be able to reach the Pierre before sunset.”
Bratian dropped his hand on Lucy's knee as if he had known her all his life, and she knew the gesture was more friendly than intimate.
“For God's sake,” he said across her to Lassiter, “stop trying to knock her out!” And to Lucy, “That's a nice-looking town you came from, though I wouldn't want to have to sell advertising in it.”
The ordered chaos of the skyway increased as cars kept pouring up the ramps from Newark. Suddenly she was looking at the cliff of tenements that rise like a ragged Chinese Wall over the butt of Jersey City.
“You'd better keep your eyes shut here,” Bratian said. “That's always a good thing to do around Jersey City.”
When finally they entered the tunnel Lucy did close her eyes, and the hum of the enclosed traffic added its volume to the roar of aircraft motors that still
beat in her brain.
THE hum was still in her head at three in the morning as she crouched alone at the window of a room in the Pierre and looked down at Fifth Avenue twenty floors below. Her knees were on the carpet, her forearms rested on the sill, her hair was loose over her shoulders as she knelt there looking out at the city. Behind her in the dark room Lassiter lay asleep on the bed.
Lucy lifted her arms and drew the dressing gown closer about her body, then her forearms returned to the window sill and she remained motionless. Her head and shoulders made a small, solitary outline in the frame of the window against the glow of the sky over New York.
As far as her eyes could see, the traffic lights on the avenue were red. They changed. And as far as her eyes could see they were green. A vagrant taxi whispered down the avenue below her window and turned east into Fifty-ninth Street. Two other taxis were passing slowly along Central Park South. A solitary man was leaning against a tree on the opposite side of the avenue, so motionless he seemed like a part of the tree. And the lights kept changing: green and red, green and red, and in spite of the silence of the room and the apparent silence about the hotel, there was a humming sound everywhere, not like the beat of a heart but like the multitudinous lifeforce of millions of insects throbbing in the darkness of a summer night. Yet different even from this, for there was no variation in the hum, no rise and fall or cadence, but only this unbroken monotone as steady as eternity. The towers were silent and majestic. Only their upper parts were visible above the massive darkness at the base and the paler darkness holding the stars. She wondered why so many of them still had lights burning. Across the park, in one of a pair of dark towers, she saw a light break out in a single room, a solitary cell near the top of the tower, it winked off and came on again immediately, and it remained, flickering the size of a star across the park into her eyes. For half an hour she knelt there motionless until her legs began to grow cold. Then she got up and felt the stiffness behind her knees and realized how tired she was. Her hands passed slowly and wonderingly over her breasts and loins and her memory of everything older than twenty-four hours was as vacant as an empty room. No solitude she had ever known had been like this. Her mind was bursting with strange new images, but she could think of nothing. For a moment she tried to pray, but could find no words, for even God seemed irrelevant in this region of random lights encased in thousands of cells of invisible ferro-concrete between the earth and the sky.
The Precipice Page 23
