The next time Nina was posted for leave she wrote to Lucy, suggesting that she would like to visit New York again. Lucy answered by return mail.
I'd love to have you because it's so long since I've seen anyone from home but you wouldn't like it here right now, Nina. We're in too much confusion. Stephen has so much work to do he's hardly ever home and I have no servants and John and Sally are pretty demanding. You know we've moved out from New York to Princeton, but you probably don't realize that Princeton is hardly any larger than Grenville, and what you need, probably, is fun in a gayer place right now.
Nina felt that Lucy's answer meant more than it said. She was disappointed, so she went home to Grenville, and it was on this trip that she realized for the first time that Jane was showing her age. Her sister's movements had become stiffer and the lines were hardening and deepening in her face. She seemed to belong to a different level of existence from the one Nina had come to accept as her own. Jane didn't seem to matter much to anyone any more, and for the first time Nina felt superior to her.
Even the old house seemed to have grown smaller. The garden, which Nina had never given much thought when Lucy was at home, made her feel sad, for Jane had hired a man to dig up at least half of the beds and plant them with vegetables, and only the hardiest of the perennials struggled for survival in the other beds among the rank weeds that had flourished in the rich soil. But Jane was proud of her Victory Garden; it gave her much satisfaction to see something useful coming out of their own ground, and she pickled tomatoes and cucumbers and gave away quantities of beans and carrots and lettuce to the neighbours, and people continued to say how wonderful it was that a solitary woman managed to get so many things done. Jane had as many music pupils as ever. She worked at the Red Cross, organized rummage sales at the church, still sat on the library committee, and was now convenor of a town improvement society formed by a group of women for the purpose of obliterating the pool room which Nick Petropolis had expanded into a thriving business for the purpose of selling airmen drinks after hours.
One rainy evening as Nina sat with Jane in the dark living room where the furniture seemed more dusty and dilapidated than it ever had before, she fingered the pages of the book on her lap and wondered if there was any place in the world where she could feel that she belonged. She watched Jane counting the stitches on her knitting needles, and suddenly she said, “Why doesn't Lucy ever come home? She's been away more than six years and she's never been back here once.”
Jane continued to count stitches and when she reached the end of the row she said, “Because I've never invited her.”
“But why not?”
Jane turned the row and started to knit again, and to Nina, sitting on a hassock in front of the empty hearth with her yellow hair loose over her forehead, the pause seemed eternal.
“Lucy made a deliberate choice,” Jane said finally. “She left us as casually as a servant girl who gets into trouble. After twenty-eight years of living in this house, she went away without even saying good-bye to me.”
Nina was unable to realize that Jane's bitterness came from her terrible loneliness and from her pride in never revealing it. She opened her book again, deciding that Jane was so old-fashioned she was incomprehensible.
That night when she went to bed in the familiar room in which she had slept as a child, the feeling came over Nina that she had been cheated. After all these years – after college, and her training in the Wrens, and her life in Halifax – she was still a small-town girl who had not managed to get a husband. And she couldn't understand why. She had always been told she was a pretty girl, and boys in school and college had always liked her. If she couldn't get a man, how was it that someone like Lucy had succeeded?
The small lines which had begun to form around her mouth tightened in the dark. She was sure she was prettier than Lucy had ever been, her figure was better, and her hair – she reached out to feel it with her hands – was really lovely. She wondered how Stephen Lassiter had ever come to pick out Lucy, of all the girls he had met in Grenville. And then she wondered what she herself would have said or done had Stephen shown any interest in her that summer he had come to Grenville. She would probably have refused him. He reminded her a little of the first airman she had met in Halifax. Well, at least she had never made herself look cheap.
At breakfast the next morning, while Jane was pouring the coffee and talking about the war, Nina decided she couldn't endure even three more days of Grenville. The old house was nothing more than a lair where Jane lurked and grew old.
MATT MCCUNN told the crews of the various ships on which he served that if he had received a stripe for every time he was torpedoed he would have been a vice-admiral by the end of 1942. As it was, he never rose higher in the merchant service than quartermaster; he was considered too old to be worth training into an officer. But even if McCunn had been younger he would probably have stayed where he was, for his heart was in every fo'c'sle and privates’ mess in the world. So long as there were people anywhere who rejected the idea of success, he was with them.
He was first torpedoed off Newfoundland in the fall of 1940 on a former Greek vessel which had been put on the fringe of the convoy because she would have been the smallest loss if she was hit. McCunn was glad to see the ship go, for she was the worst he had ever sailed on, so badly balanced that the best quartermaster in the world couldn't keep her wake from looking like a corkscrew. McCunn walked off her and onto the deck of a destroyer without even wetting his feet, and he was in Halifax four days later. Another ship went down under him the next April, in the night; and during the twenty minutes he spent in the water he nearly froze to death. His worst season was the winter of 1942, when he was torpedoed five times, three times on a single convoy.
After that voyage McCunn spent several months in a boarding house in Liverpool, but he got restless again and went up to Scotland, and in Leith signed on a vessel for the Mediterranean. He knew as well as anyone that Malta convoys were the worst in the war, but by this time he was beginning to feel himself indestructible and he was interested in warmer water than the north Atlantic. He made Malta on one convoy in which his ship and three others were the only merchantmen out of twenty-four to get through. He saw a bomb hit the Formidable and a second later the whole carrier flash into a moving sheet of flame, then sail on, and an hour later receive planes back on her deck. That, he said to himself, is what comes of having men on the bridges with straight stripes on their sleeves.
Later he watched a large bomb curve down for the Rodney and disappear just under her forefoot, then the sea jerk as though somebody had kicked it underneath, rise in a mushroom of water a hundred and fifty feet high, and the Rodney walk through it and come out with her decks streaming and all her guns firing, lashing out with all nine sixteen-inchers on her long foredeck at a formation of torpedo planes. McCunn had never seen a sixteen-inch gun fired before, much less at an airplane, and he thought with exhilaration that if they were using H.E. in shells that size against aircraft this must be the hottest convoy action of the whole war, and by God, here he was in the middle of it! Looking around at one after the other of the merchant ships in his convoy being hit as he leaned on the rail, he found himself admiring the feathery wakes made by torpedoes in the blue Mediterranean, the wild flaming arcs of struck planes, the big Royal Navy ships handing it back, and he couldn't help comparing this scene favourably with the Atlantic where he had never seen a better ship than the Revenge and attacks were always made at night with corvettes and destroyers exploding millions of dead fish to the surface for every submarine they touched. The Mediterranean seemed a very good sea for a war. McCunn found himself enjoying the sheen of sunlight on the white plumes of bombed-up water, almost hoping that a twisting, turning Heinkel would get through so there would be another bomb-burst and another plume of water glistening in the sun against an azure sea.
That night when his ship docked in Malta and the let-down set in and a crowd of half-starving Maltese
worked frantically to get the cargo out of her before the dive-bombers returned in the morning, McCunn wondered if he might just possibly be going crazy. It was a bad sign when a man enjoyed the sight of a torpedo coming at him. A friend of his in the old war had become the same way he was now, so shell-happy he had thought himself immortal until he stopped taking cover, and the same shell-burst which had relieved McCunn of one of his most prized possessions had killed the man because he had made no attempt to get out of the way.
On his return to Gibraltar, McCunn managed to get himself transferred to a vessel bound for Alex around the Cape. The long voyage made in complete safety rested him and gave him a hankering for the shore. He had been in the war for more than three years without seeing a single German, with the exception of a corpse which a wavy-navy lieutenant-commander in charge of a corvette had hoped would be accepted as evidence for a sinking, and that had been two years ago in Greenock where the body had arrived preserved in ice. So in Alexandria he got himself transferred again, this time illegally, to a special unit of Americans who had volunteered to convey supplies to the partisans in Yugoslavia. The Americans called him Pop and the officer in charge had no idea what to do with him when he discovered, after the unit was under way, that McCunn was not the interpreter he had been given to understand he was and could speak no word of any language but his own.
McCunn stayed with them, however, and when they landed at night in a cove not far from Dubrovnik and went inland with a group of Dalmatian shepherds guarding a straggly caravan of donkeys and mules, he was glad to leave the sea behind. For the first time he felt close to the war and close to the Germans he had fought in the last one, and he could climb as well as any of the younger men. But he had to be silent on this strange march, and so he began to think of Grenville, and thinking of Grenville to be a little homesick, almost for the first time in his life.
EARLY in 1941, Marcia Stapleton went out to Nevada to obtain her third divorce. On her return she continued working for the magazine and continued to work competently, she saw her old friends and her energy was enough to carry her through evening after evening she later wished she had never spent. She took up her psychoanalysis where she had dropped it, but nothing much came of it and after a while it simply petered out and left her drained.
The analyst may have come to the conclusion that she was a difficult case, but he at least managed to leave with her a strong sense of guilt and a feeling of remorse for having had three husbands without conceiving a single child. Two months after Pearl Harbor she gave up her job and enrolled as a nurse's aid, and for the required length of time she worked in Bellevue, cleaning up after the regular nurses, handling bedpans, and frequently working past the point of exhaustion. She watched human beings die. She saw men lie in the wards with their faces exposed to everyone's eyes after receiving death sentences from doctors. She learned that most men at such moments grieve less for themselves than for their failure to provide for the families they are leaving behind. So New York, which hitherto she had seen only from the upper surface, began to appear like a gigantic aquarium teeming with ancient and invisible life: raw, terrible, humorous, brave, and infinitely various. Her own problems faded into nothing, and she wondered if this was how women of society had felt centuries before when they took vows and entered religious orders.
Marcia began to realize that some of the regular nurses and even a few of the doctors considered her useful. It was the first time people she respected had ever thought such a thing about her. Patients found ways of showing they liked her. A boy of six patted her hand and said she was like his mother. Poor women told her in foreign accents about their husbands and children. A little tailor, tremendously proud of his honesty and his skill at his trade, explained that he would never have been so successful if it were not for his wife. “My memory is bad, but Mrs. Shapiro is vondervoll. She knows every pair of pants in the neighbourhood, so for vat do I need a secretary?”
Later in the war, after she had taken several specialized courses, Marcia was admitted to work in a military hospital. One night when she was off duty and ready to go to bed an orderly told her that an airman, so horribly burned that after nine months and many grafts he was still swathed in bandages, wanted to see her. “He's on his way out,” the orderly said as she stood with him in the elevator. “He wants to see you before the priest gets here.”
But the priest had already arrived when Marcia reached the bed and he was administering the last rites. After the boy was blessed, Marcia took his hand which was motionless and still covered with bandages. The boy could not talk and he seemed to be unconscious, though his eyes were open. Somehow he reminded her of Bruce Fraser, and she sat for several hours by the bedside with the priest, thinking of Bruce and wondering if she would ever see him again and whether or not he would like her better if he knew her now. “I spoiled everything by going to bed with him when he didn't love me,” she thought.
The airman died in the early morning and a little later Marcia was standing with the priest on the steps of the hospital, glad of the fresh air, glad of the sight of city roofs beginning to emerge out of the mists of the night, but with sorrow inside her mind.
“Last week,” she said, “that boy was glad to be alive, and tonight he was just as glad to die. It's horrible.”
“Horrible?” he said. “You're mistaken.”
For the first time she noticed the priest as a man. She saw that he was not much older than herself, that he had intense black eyes, black hair, and rugged physical strength. She wondered why such a man, so full of vitality that if he had been in lay clothes any normal woman would have been instantly aware of him, had chosen to become a priest. She had never known any priests or for that matter many Roman Catholics; they had always seemed to exist apart and she had thought them primitive and backward, opposed to everything the well-meaning generation had stood for. Now, looking at this man, she recalled a remark she had made to Bruce Fraser about herself and the kind of people she had known. “We've all gone straight to hell trying to do the right thing.”
The priest, apparently believing she was still thinking of the boy who had just died, said quietly, “It's not unnatural for a man to be glad to be alive and to be glad to die a week later. Sometimes people have to find themselves in hell before they can see there's a way out of it.”
Marcia started. “Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I suppose so.”
CARL BRATIAN, who claimed to be free of illusion in most matters, had no difficulty in persuading himself that he had none whatever about the war. The fact that it was taking place at all merely reinforced his conviction that in the twentieth century the human race was completely helpless, and he watched with cynical satisfaction an acquaintance who had worked diligently for World Peaceways, Inc. rushing off to Washington to make sure of a job for himself in owi. “If you can make them believe they're fighting for a better world,” Bratian said, “you can make them believe anything.”
In January of 1942, Bratian pulled out of the agency in which he had been a junior partner and founded a new one of his own, taking with him three account-executives, including Stephen Lassiter. Stephen was of use to him because only shortly before he had landed the Harper Aircraft account, had turned Ashweiler's plumbing account over to a junior, and had made so marked an initial success with Harper's that he was able to take the account with him into Bratian's firm.
The contracts which Carl drew up with his new associates made it impossible for any of them, if they chose to leave him, to take their accounts with them. In return for this lack of freedom each man was guaranteed a larger share of the profits.
In a profession which had become one of the notably unhappy ones of this world, and which seemed to become more unhappy the more intelligent it became, Carl Bratian really enjoyed his work. He had an authentic money-hunger; he had, in addition to a natural flair for getting inside the minds of other people, the one faculty without which no man is ever supremely successful: the ability to get along with
only half the normal amount of sleep. He was always awake by six in the morning and he did his heaviest work after midnight.
During his boyhood on lower Tenth Avenue, Bratian had lived in a place where the noises seldom ceased from dusk to dawn. It still seemed a luxury to him to be alone at two in the morning in a clean, sound-proof office, knowing he was the only man working with his brain in that dark shaft of a building, feeling good, feeling a wonderful sense of private power whenever the conviction came over him that he, alone of all the men he knew, completely understood the time in which he lived. The money-hunger might be in him, but something else was there too, something which was a legacy of his father's ideologies. It was essential for him to believe that he, Carl Bratian, really knew what he was doing; that he, Carl Bratian, was superior to the others who were merely smart. He could save his energy while the rest of them worried, and it made him feel good to think how much they did worry. He was living in an age of anxiety, but the anxiety did not touch him. Other men worried over their wives and children, over their jobs, over money whether they had it or not, over the gnawing self-hatred some of them felt because they did work they despised but wanted the money it brought, over the women they wanted to sleep with, had slept with, wanted to get rid of, over the mere fact of being alive. From the whole spectacle of his time he derived a satisfaction that was almost savage. “Do you want a symbol of it?” he asked. “I'll give you one. A Hollywood actor – making three thousand a week – joining the Communist Party because he thinks he's prostituting himself.”
More often than not in the summer Bratian worked until dawn and left the office with his brain racing so fast he felt he understood everything that was or had been or ever would be. At such moments, seeing the buildings hazed by the early morning mist, his nostrils scenting in the haze the premonitions of coming heat, New York seemed to belong to him as surely as the whole world belongs to a boy walking silently along a country lane to a trout stream while the first light is fingering the sky. Where were they now, the kids who had pushed him around twenty-five years ago? He knew where one of them was – Tony Fasanella, with a flattened nose and permanent welts over his eyes, dead broke when he wasn't selling pop or programs at Jamaica, breaking into a laugh whenever anyone spoke to him. And Carl remembered his mother: “So if he does kick you? You run away. You don't let him get his hands near your brain!”
The Precipice Page 29
