The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Moving carefully so as not to make a sound, she crossed the carpeted floor to the bed. It was too dark in the room to see anything but vague shapes: three chairs, a writing desk, a dresser, and the double bed. There was still a brightness behind her eyes. It was the image she had seen earlier that evening when Bratian had left them after cocktails and they had stepped out on the pavement in front of the Pierre to confront one of the most immense spectacles in the world: the mighty rampart of checkered light leaping out of the purple darkness of the sky above Central Park South, the moving blaze of taxi headlights, and then, as they strolled hand in hand an unknown distance down the avenue, many blocks farther down the island yet so brilliant it seemed imminent above her, the icy stalagmite of the Empire State.

  Stephen was a dim bulk as he lay on his back, the covers down to his waist, his powerful torso naked. She lay down beside him. The exposed skin of his chest and shoulders was cold, but under the sheets his thighs were warm. She lay there wide awake, while his chest rose and fell as he breathed in his sleep. For many minutes she did not stir.

  She was remembering a winter day in her childhood in Ontario years ago. Her father as a special treat had promised to hire a horse and sleigh and take Jane and herself for a drive one Saturday afternoon. They had looked forward to the drive all week. But when the afternoon came the sun went under the clouds and the frost cracked down, a raw wind blew out of the northeast, the maples were stark against the deadness of the snow, and she had shivered with cold. Her ears had frozen to numbness but she had been ashamed to mention it because the sleigh-drive was a treat and her father would have been disappointed if she had not enjoyed it. Afterwards in the warmth of the house her thawing ears had burned so hotly she had been conscious of nothing else for hours.

  Her heart felt that way now. Her whole body and mind felt that way. All her life she had been wrapped up like a child against the winter, only her ears hearing rumours of the lives of other people, her eyes trying to content themselves with the austere and distant beauty of bare trees and hill-lines silhouetted against winter skies. Now her whole soul seemed to be unfreezing. She was like other women after all. She would have children as other women did. Tears started to her eyes and she had to repress a longing to throw her arms about the strange man beside her and bring him back to her out of his sleep.

  The weight of her head against his shoulder finally woke Stephen. He stirred and she heard him murmur her name; then he surged up, a shadowy mass against the pale frame of the window, his arms came about her again, and with a slow and formidable tenderness he held her close. Out of the darkness she heard her own voice calling his name.

  TWO

  LIKE SO MANY CANADIANS BEFORE him, Bruce Fraser came down to the United States in 1940 on the defensive, subconsciously determined not to be lured into discontent with his own country. After stepping off the Montreal train into Grand Central at seven-thirty in the morning he began to walk around the city. His first impression led to astonishment when he discovered that New York, in addition to being stupendous, was also friendly.

  It was late afternoon by the time he found the upper reaches of the Fifth Avenue shopping district. Sometime during the day the old inherited attitude had disappeared. As. he walked north with alert steps he was pleased when people noticed his new Airforce uniform with the Canada shoulder-flashes. The light in Fifth Avenue was faintly golden. New York was at its best; it was beginning to reveal the pastel quality of a fine autumn evening.

  He paused in front of Van Cleef and Arpels to look at unset rubies which lay on a bed of satin in a box window, a great single jewel surrounded by a garland of lesser ones, lying only a few inches from his eyes. It was like observing a queen naked, near and naked to tempt her subjects, surrounded by her women and guarded by an invisible wall. Bruce wondered how much they cost. Then the puritan side of his nature was assuaged by the consideration that these imperious stones, valuable enough to support a family in comfort for years, would probably be bought by a newly rich merchant who feared inflation, to be hidden in a bank vault or hung about the sinewy neck of a faded wife.

  He smiled to himself and continued his walk. A faint odour blended of numerous perfumes clung to the humid air, and once again he became conscious of many women. As he walked north the avenue opened up before him, running into the Plaza with buses and taxis and cars and people. The hard faces, the indifferent faces, the happy faces, the beautiful women, the spoiled women, the women looking forward to being loved, the women no man would ever love again – he saw them all with a clarity that generally needs fatigue or drink or even drugs to make it sharp, he saw moving in front of him a tall lithe girl with tawny hair, slim hips, wide shoulders, and beautiful rhythmic legs, he reminded himself that he had never in his life talked to a girl who looked and carried herself like that, and wondered what kind of life had bred such an Athenian self-confidence, and how a man like himself would seem to such a girl if he could ever meet her.

  This was a new kind of perspective for Bruce. He had always taken it for granted that most people his own age would find him interesting, and he had always felt a mild superiority to Americans in general, without knowing anything about them except what he read in the newspapers and magazines.

  This section of New York continued to take him aback. He had expected no such grace or dignity in an American city, for until today the only other one he had seen was Detroit. So far as he could tell, nearly every important building on Fifth Avenue except the churches and hotels existed solely for business purposes, and it was almost a shock to see such grace of design in buildings used for earning a living. The astonishing thought occurred to him that there must be people here who considered that business itself was beautiful.

  It was now a quarter to five. Lucy had asked him to come to their apartment at six to be in time for cocktails before dinner. He still had more than an hour to kill.

  As he turned east into Fifty-ninth Street the feeling of vitality continued to bear him along. All day he had been feeding on the power and self-confidence of New York, lapping up all of it he could absorb. From a stationery shop came the good smell of clean stacked paper and fresh cards. He paused to examine the bright jackets of new novels in a bookstore window. A refrain sang through his mind in time to the drive of the traffic: “They'll never beat us, we'll knock hell out of the sons of bitches, they'll never beat us.” It was the first time in six months that he had felt this way about the war. It was peculiar to come down to New York, which was supposed to be in a neutral country, and have the city make him feel like this.

  The traffic was thick when he reached the darker, more serious air of Madison. He went into a flower shop where the chrysanthemums looked so fresh and fluffy he would have ordered a couple of dozen of them if he could have afforded it, but the export of Canadian currency was so closely controlled just then that he had to be satisfied with half a dozen. The clerk promised to send them out at once.

  When he left the flower shop the air seemed much darker. The sunshine was still bright on the tops of the buildings on the eastern side of the street, but on the pavement there were no shadows. More people: a woman in a black dress with a lifted face, tightly squeezed hips and a high bosom, a string of graduated pearls around her neck, and perfectly slimmed legs; their eyes met for an instant, he felt the impact of a cosmic disillusionment, and then she was past. Two laughing girls. A white-haired gentleman with a black homburg and an erect back. A Mediterranean type gesturing happily to his wife. A woman in a mink coat coming out of a Gristede's with two bags of groceries in her arms.

  Suddenly Bruce felt very tired. He had absorbed all of New York his senses could take for a while. North of Fifty-ninth Street he turned into a restaurant with a bar at the front, sat down in a dark corner, and ordered a rye and soda.

  The drink warmed, softened, and loosened him. He glanced at a solitary girl near him who was sitting with a drink in front of her, apparently unconscious. The barman was talking to the proprietor
about horses. Bruce leaned back with his eyes half closed and whole sequences of New York scenery began to jump through his head.

  He wondered how much of the city he had really seen that day. He smelled again the pickles, spices, and fresh fruit which had delighted his nostrils that morning on Third Avenue. He smelled subways. He remembered the curious procession of shipping clerks pushing racks of women's dresses somewhere on Seventh. Popcorn and peanuts – where had he smelled them? He remembered the sharp bite of salt air when he walked up from the subway in Bowling Green just before noon, and the old lady on the Fifth Avenue bus, the one who had got on just above Washington Square, who had bent toward him across the aisle to say, “I just want you to know I feel grateful.”

  God, it was a friendly city! It had lifted him up and let the weight of the past six months slide right off the edge of his mind.

  “Down on leave?”

  He opened his eyes and saw that the little table next to his own had been occupied by an American lieutenant about his own age. Bruce had not seen many uniforms in New York today.

  “Yes.”

  They began to talk. The American said he had been in the army seven months, since before the draft started. The politicians, they should take them out and line them up, there wasn't any equipment in the whole goddam country. What New York needed was a stick of bombs right across the length of Times Square, a whole line of them pounding right across from the Times Building to the Wrigley sign, and then maybe the country would wake up. On second thoughts probably not even that would be enough. Right now the country was sleep-walking. Did Bruce think he was fooling? Right now a Panzer Division could land at Provincetown and feed itself on filling stations from there to California and have a swell party all the way so long as it kept out of Texas. Yes, he came from Texas. Bruce ought to go down there some time. It made no sense to try to judge the United States by New York. That was what foreigners did all the time and they made their mistake right there at the beginning. What were the chances of getting some action if he went up to Canada? He was sick of the infantry and wanted to get into the Army Air Corps, but what the hell could you do in that outfit when the politicians were fighting about contracts and there weren't any planes? The bastards had him in the infantry. What was it like up in Canada, Canada was at war wasn't it, what was it like up there?

  Bruce wondered if he could even tell him what it was like if he tried. Sometimes the whole metabolism of a country changes, but the change is internal and hardly anyone is aware of it until long afterwards. On the surface there was so little difference that everybody felt guilty because the country was doing so little. There was no equipment. The army was drilling with wooden rifles because most of the real ones had been sent to England after Dunkirk. Seventy-ship convoys were leaving Halifax escorted by four destroyers, and sometimes, if there were reports that the Scharnhorst or a pocket-battleship was out, the old Revenge, the Jutland veteran, lumbered along in support with fifteen-inch guns that shook the guts out of her every time she fired them.

  “You boys certainly shellacked the bastards over London yesterday,” the Texan said.

  “It'll be all right if they can keep it up.”

  “Why can't they keep it up? Aren't they knocking hell out of them? What do you fly yourself – fighters or bombers?”

  “So far nothing but an Anson training crate.”

  “When you get over what'll they put you into?”

  “Bombers, probably.”

  “If I get into the Air Corps I want a pursuit ship.”

  Looking at him, Bruce guessed he would certainly get one. He was the type. He had the jutting jaw, sandy hair, and the loose, bold cockiness that went with the natural fighter pilot. Besides, he seemed the kind of man to whom a certain amount of fighting is absolutely necessary to mental health.

  “George,” the Texan drawled to the barman, “let's have two more of the same.”

  The drinks came and they continued to talk shop. It seemed a natural thing to do. And yet, only a year ago, nothing had been more unnatural for Bruce than to talk shop about the war. He had entered the Airforce in angry resignation, telling himself bitterly that everything had happened just as he had foreseen, that the old men had got him just as they had got everyone else. Those were the days when men who had been on relief for years joined the army to get a job. They were the days when the recruiting sergeants often sent men home if their shoes looked too worn to survive the first fortnight's drilling, before proper army boots came through in the issue. They were the days when businessmen congratulated themselves on Hitler's pact with Russia, telling each other in their clubs that now they knew where they stood.

  Those days seemed to belong to another century now. You wrote your own life off and achieved a certain freedom as a result. You were a man apart, one of the first who would get it. The others would get it too, but they still deluded themselves that they would slip by without death noticing them. Now only the form of death remained fearful. Death itself had become a sort of goal for everybody. Bruce didn't exactly put it this way to himself, but it was roughly how he felt about it.

  He pushed the table forward and got up, telling the Texan how glad he was to have met him but that he had a six o'clock date and would have to be on his way. The Texan insisted on appropriating the bill. They argued about it, but the lieutenant was firm, and Bruce finally thanked him, shook hands, and left.

  When he reached the pavement the traffic was a throbbing mass waiting for the lights to change. He walked north two blocks and got into a bus. It was jam-packed and when it started it gave such a jerk a heavy man was thrown against him. He struggled clear and found a little blonde girl pressed against his side, too short to hold onto a strap. She had wistful friendly eyes and a soft dimpled chin. They smiled at each other without speaking and it was a pleasure to brace her against the sudden lurches. When he got off the bus at Seventy-second Street he felt a sharp sense of loss, knowing he would never see her again.

  Then he began to think of Lucy and the prospect of finding someone familiar in this city. But his ideas were jumping around, and by the time he reached the foyer of her apartment building he began to wonder if it had been such a good notion to let her know he was coming down to New York to spend his leave. He wanted very much to see her, he had thought of her often during the past two years, and the last time he had been home in Grenville the little lane where they had lived all their lives had seemed empty without her. But he knew from experience how disappointing old friends can seem in new surroundings. You remembered only the part of them that was valuable to you, and when you met them again this old familiar part no longer counted for much in their eyes and you both had to go through the fiction of pretending it did.

  THOUGH the Lassiters’ apartment was not large – Lucy called to him from the kitchen as the maid took his cap and coat – it seemed fabulously luxurious to Bruce. Gold damask drapes caught the lights and contrasted with bluish-grey walls and dark broadloom carpet. The functional furniture was upholstered in ocean blue, some chairs were striped with gold and others were plain blue. Three bowls of yellow calendulas stood on glass-topped tables. The hearth was smooth and black, and a square, unframed mirror rose to the ceiling above it. There was precision in the beauty of the room, as well as in the way the mirror doubled its apparent size.

  Lucy came in from the kitchen bearing his white chrysanthemums in a tall glass vase, smiled at him, and made a helpless gesture with her shoulders as he moved forward to shake hands. She set the vase on a coffee table and turned to greet him, and he saw that on the surface at least she was no longer shy.

  “What an amazing room!” he said. “How on earth did you do it?”

  She moved toward a chair at one end of the fireplace and indicated that he was to sit on the small sofa opposite. Instead he stood in front of the hearth looking down at her, repeating how good it was to see her again while all the time his surprise was making him feel unnatural and his elbow kept reaching for a mantelp
iece that wasn't there.

  “This place is wonderful, but how do you ever relax in it?”

  She laughed, and he noticed a new gaiety in her voice. “We've lived in it for over a year but it still seems an absurd room for someone like me to have. Marcia – Stephen's sister – told me I'd be a fool if I tried to put anything in a Seventy-second Street apartment that would remind me of home, and at the time I was glad enough to take her advice. Stephen let me do whatever I liked, but I think he's regretted it since. I have, too. This isn't a room for a man to have to live in.”

  He looked down at her and tried to think of something to say. In the old days her hair had been unnecessarily, even aggressively plain. Now it was cut and softly curled, it was dark and lustrous, and in the shaded light it brought out the deep brown of her eyes and the warmth of her lips. She was wearing a dinner dress of lime-green silk held at the waist by a wide belt of gold kid. It moulded the lines of a figure he realized for the first time was charming. The maid came to the entrance of the living room to ask a question and Lucy rose to join her in the kitchen. When she moved there was the slightest sound of silk; she was so attractive and supple that he wondered what had been the matter with him in Grenville that he had never seen the possibility of Lucy Cameron turning into a woman as maturely lovely as this.