The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  The soldier's long body swayed under the yellow lights as the train slowed to a fast stop. Lucy rose and slipped the strap of her bag over her left shoulder.

  “If nobody's meeting you perhaps I could drive you home?” she said. “My car's in the parking lot.”

  “That's mighty nice of you, but it's farther out of your way than you think. My folks live outside of Princeton. It's Hunter's farm, off the Trenton pike.”

  Lucy smiled at him for the first time. “How nice! Your father happens to be one of my best friends, and you're Jim, of course.”

  As they drove along Nassau Street and out the Trenton pike the sky was filled with stars and a young moon was setting in the trees. Lucy turned into the Hunter farm and drove away again before Sam and his wife could see her and be forced out of politeness to let her intrude on the boy's homecoming. As she closed her own garage door on the station wagon some of the strange lightness was still with her. She spoke briefly to Shirley who was sitting by the door with her scarf tied around her head and was gone before Lucy could do more than thank her for staying.

  On her way upstairs Lucy heard a sound in the darkness and knew John was sitting up in bed in the nursery.

  “Mummy, you promised you'd be back by nine,” he said as she opened the door.

  “I know, dear. But New York's such a big city I got lost for a time.”

  “I got lost this afternoon, too, but only for a little while.”

  “Did you? Well, go back to sleep now and in the morning I'll tell you something wonderful.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “Well, maybe just a little bit of it now. I met Mr. Hunter's son on the train, and –”

  “The one that's in the Airborne?”

  “I suppose that's what he was in. Anyway, I drove him home. He'd just come all the way from England in an airplane. Yesterday he was in England and now he's home on the farm.”

  “Did he come in one of Daddy's planes?”

  “I'll tell you all about it in the morning.”

  “Promise, Mummy?”

  “Promise.”

  She touched her fingers to his lips, looked into Sally's crib and saw she was sleeping quietly, then closed the door of the nursery and went into her own room. Where were they now, she wondered. In Stephen's apartment or in Gail's?

  THE days passed somehow and grew warmer. It was the spring for which more than a billion people had been waiting for over six years. Any hour now American and British armies would make contact with the Russians in Germany. The nightmare created by a generation of technicians in temporary collusion with a madman was nearly over, and for this little while the world seemed to be wide awake, like a fever patient between dreams.

  Lucy found herself thinking back to the early days of the war when Canada was in it and the United States was not. She remembered the weeks of the London Blitz, the feeling of exposure it had given her, as though the solid floor of her own spiritual past had collapsed and left her dangling over a void. She remembered the jolt to perspective when she discovered that Americans had come to think of England as an outpost, the way the British, only yesterday, had thought of Poland and even of France.

  Alone with the children in Princeton, Lucy began to wonder if one of the causes of her failure to hold Stephen's love might not simply be the fact that he was an American and she was not. The war did queer things to everybody, made them exaggerate themselves, made them take an unnatural view of strangers. Had she as a Canadian, raised in a small country which once had believed the United Kingdom to be the centre of the world, failed to understand what this terrific spectacle of rising American power meant to someone like Stephen Lassiter? A man could be conscious of it without being a politician. The sense of this power was everywhere. During the Depression it had slept like a hibernating animal grunting and tossing in its cave, but now it was striding forth, darting its eyes backward and all around, insensately loud and proud in exact proportion to its haunting knowledge that the greater it grew the more certain it was to lose forever the freshness of its youth and the very innocence which had made America unique.

  But Stephen was her husband. What was manufactured nationalism compared to all they had shared together?

  Yet there was definitely some place where she had made a mistake. There was her longing for stability, which meant little or nothing to him. She had come slowly to realize that contentment, which would have meant everything to her, was boring to Stephen, and she wondered if almost any American woman would not have been able to accommodate herself better to his inner restlessness. To Lucy it often seemed a hard thing to be an American; harder than to be anything else. In a small country, contentment was easier to achieve because there were always limits. In America there were no limits, or none that Stephen had ever recognized. Apparently he had always expected something new around every corner and had been reared to consider himself a failure unless he found it: more money to make, more ideas to try out, more women to sleep with, more rules to smash, more impossibilities to make commonplace. Part of her failure lay simply in her incapacity to keep him amused, in not being able to feel enthusiastic about the kind of success he had made, in not sharing the same values. And yet – what did Stephen really want now? She didn't know. Worse still, he didn't know either. From what was he trying to escape? From his own inner sense of failure? But failure to do what?

  In the middle of the week following her trip to New York, Stephen surprised her by coming home to spend a night. She found him much quieter than usual and his manner cautioned her to forget her half-formed idea of talking things out with him and perhaps reaching something approaching an understanding. He took only a short drink before dinner and then insisted on going upstairs to put Sally to bed. She left him alone with the child in the nursery while she worked in the kitchen. After dinner he spent half an hour on the lawn behind the house tossing a football to John, teaching him how to hold it if he wanted to throw a forward pass and how to catch it by taking it against his chest and clasping it there with his hands and forearms. Stephen was quieter and more patient than usual when John made mistakes, and John was excited and proud because his father had come home, so he thought, especially to play with him. They came into the house glistening with sweat and Lucy sent John to take a bath before he went to bed.

  Afterwards when the house was quiet Stephen sat in his long chair and for twenty minutes said nothing while Lucy sat at her desk and worked on her account books, hardly conscious of the figures her pencil made. She knew he was watching her, and once she looked up and smiled at him, but he seemed not to see her. She finished making entries, put her papers into a drawer, then picked up a book and moved to another chair. Stephen was still watching her.

  As she opened the book to find her place he said, “You remember Austie Phillips, don't you?”

  “Yes, of course.” Austin had been a classmate and close friend of Stephen's. She remembered him as a scientist of brilliance, with wonderful eyes and a happy laugh.

  “He was killed day before yesterday. In the beginning of the war he refused to work on a scientific job. They wanted him to develop a new fluid for flame-throwers. He pulled wires until he got into the army and I don't think he was physically A-1, either.” He stared straight ahead. “In town they're already talking about another war. What's the matter with us?”

  There was another long silence and finally he got up and filled his pipe, moved across the room, lifted the silver cigarette box he had won in a tournament nearly twenty years ago, held it to the light, and set it down again.

  “Everything seemed so damn simple when I was playing for that.”

  He returned to his chair; and his restlessness, unaccompanied by any nervous gesture, was like a third person in the room. Lucy tried to hold his eyes, to ease his tension with a reassuring smile, but he refused to look at her unless she was looking at something else. So she went back to her book.

  With a sudden movement he laid down his pipe and picked Lucy up in his arms, h
is forearm under her thighs, his hand under her hip. He kissed her fiercely and her arms went about his neck and stayed there as he carried her upstairs. In silence, and for the first time in weeks, he made love to her, holding her with a muscular fierceness so unlike him that it frightened her. Taken by surprise, she responded with a sort of blind desperation, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her thoughts exploding in the darkness like sparks from a scattered fire. Afterwards he lay breathing heavily, separate from her, breathing as if his whole spirit had been poured out. She could feel the marks on her flesh where his hands had gripped her.

  “Lucy?” he said in a heavy voice. And then, “Oh, Lucy!”

  She reached out a hand to touch him. “Yes, darling – what is it? What's the matter? You're so unhappy.” Her fingers followed the lines of his forehead, trying to smooth them out. “No matter what it is,” she said simply, “don't ever forget that I love you.”

  She tried to draw his head against her breast, but he got up as if in pain and left her, put on his dressing gown and went downstairs while she continued to lie as she was and watch a patch of moonlight on the window-sill. From the sound of his steps she knew he was in the dining room. Then he moved to the living room and then there was silence.

  She was in the nursery when she heard him start back up the stairs. She pulled a coverlet closer about John's chin, turned out the night-light, and tip-toed back to the door. Stephen's forehead was still wrinkled as he looked up at her from the landing.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  There was no intimacy in his voice, no hostility, nothing. He turned and went downstairs again, she heard the clink of a bottle against a glass and then his slippers shuffling toward the living room. After a moment she went back to bed and turned out the light and lay in the darkness.

  The following weekend Stephen did not come home at all. On Monday morning she called the office and the girl at the switchboard, recognizing her voice, put her through to him at once.

  “Oh, Lucy!” he said, his voice showing his surprise. “I meant to call you Friday. I'm sorry, but –”

  Not knowing why she did it, she hung up without speaking to him and sat still before the telephone, her hands and knees quivering with illogical anger. Now she let herself think about their last night together. It was as if he had come home to give her a final try-out, had gone back to New York and compared her with Gail, and then had tossed her into the discard. Not with calculation – oh no, not deliberately. When in his whole life had Stephen ever done anything with deliberation? The telephone rang in her face while she sat looking at the instrument and she let it ring. It rang again while she was upstairs making the beds and she let it peal through the house. In the void of the following silence she had a recollection that the same thing had happened once before in her life. Or had it happened only in a dream? No, it was a pattern repeating itself. Seven years ago in Grenville the doorbell had pealed and echoed through the house while she sat in her father's chair in the living room, unable to make a move to answer it.

  When she returned in mid-afternoon with the two children in the station wagon, her arms full of groceries, she found Stephen walking about the garden. She sent Sally with John to play at Sam Hunter's and then she entered the house, left the packages in the kitchen, and went up the stairs.

  In the dining room Shirley could hear Stephen's voice overhead, explaining something over and over again. From Lucy she heard not a sound. In a few minutes Stephen came downstairs and phoned for a taxi and then strode out of the house, leaving the front door open behind him. Shirley went to close it, but before she did she watched him walking up the road to meet the taxi on the pike – a lonely, puzzled middle-aged man.

  AT ANY moment now the war in Europe might end, and it was clear that it was not going to end as a human mission fulfilled but as a technical feat performed. The great voices, one by one, were beginning to fall silent. Roosevelt was gone, Churchill soon to retire from Downing Street by a will other than his own; these last great human voices which had been tempered in the sunshine of warm valleys no longer warmed the people or gave them a sense of fellowship with an older, richer, and mellower age. In the new tones arising was the chill of the ice-cap.

  On the first Saturday afternoon in May, Marcia and Lucy were sitting in garden chairs behind the house with the sun warm on their faces while Sally played in a sandpile in a corner of the garden and in the centre of the lawn a robin hunted for worms. John had gone to the Hunters’ farm.

  Marcia knew Lucy had heard scarcely anything she had said for the past half-hour, but she kept on talking just the same. “– and the puritans made us live with our guilt. They shamed us with our own humanity. For three hundred years we've lived on this continent in that same puritan tradition without ever knowing ourselves forgiven, and that's why we've become so callous and hard and rebellious. Even when we no longer believe in the God of our ancestors, the old guilt-habit stays. That's the trouble with Steve and I know it's the trouble with me – trying to run away from ourselves, not by finding something better but just trying to escape. Three hundred years of unspent pleasures in the bank, and every one of us thinking we had the combination of the vault.”

  She watched Sally throwing sand at the robin. “Sondberg showed me all the reasons why I'd made such an awful mess of my life by letting my subconscious bring it all to the surface. Finding out was supposed to cure me, but my analysis didn't work out that way. I felt as though I'd been passed through a wringer, saturated with perpetual burning sweat, and finally dropped with a thud in a cold, wet room. What good did it do me to find out I'd wrecked my life because I'd been resentful of my father for being a bully and hated my mother for the way she always got what she wanted out of men by flattering them? I longed to have men like me, too, and at the same time I subconsciously hated them. You know the way it works.” Her eyes kept straying off to Sally as she talked. “And the times we're living in don't help much, either. When history acts like a Rotarian on a drunken jag, how can anyone sublimate his impulses in constructive work?”

  Lucy turned to look at her sister-in-law and Marcia thought perhaps she had begun to listen.

  “What I couldn't reconcile myself to was the waste. Suppose Sondberg had cleared up all my complexes – still there was the waste. More than thirty years wasted. God, Lucy – thirty years of nothing but harm! Some psychoanalysts still believe in religion, but he doesn't. He told me any religious impulses I had were simply a residual desire to return to the security of my mother's womb, and I told him that was the very last place I wanted to go. So I asked myself, if a psychoanalyst is as much a materialist as his patient, what's the good of going to him? It's like being sick from a drop of prussic acid and trying to cure yourself by swallowing the whole bottle. Sondberg left me with the unpleasant knowledge of the contents of my subconscious, and nothing else. If a man drives his car into a brick wall it doesn't help him to be told afterwards that his brake-bands were no good.”

  Sally toddled into the centre of the lawn with two fistfuls of sand which she tried to throw at the robin. The bird flew away and the child stood looking at it with round eyes, then looked at her mother, and went back to the sandpile.

  “Then I went to work in the hospital. Every single patient in the wards was far worse off than I was and yet they seldom pitied themselves and sometimes they got well simply because they had to, for the sake of their families. You see, they had an aim. And I loved them for their dignity.” She looked at her sister-in-law. “The same kind of dignity you have, Lucy, though yours shows itself in different ways. Are you listening to me? I wish you would.”

  She waited and the cessation of her voice made Lucy turn and look at her. “I haven't told this to anyone else and I think it's rather important,” Marcia said.

  Lucy's head was resting against the back of the chair and her eyes seemed engrossed by a great white cloud that was floating across the sky.

  “I me
t Father Donovan in the wards,” Marcia went on, speaking more quietly. “He's such a tough-looking man, apart from his eyes. His eyes are wonderful. You'd have thought he'd despise someone like me, but he didn't.”

  She knew Lucy was listening now. “I remember the first time I met him. I was in the military hospital then and Father Donovan had come to give a boy who was dying the last rites. It was a Sunday and I went to church that evening for the first time in years and years. It was an Episcopalian Church. I don't know why I happened to choose it unless it just happened to be near. Ordinarily I don't like Episcopalians – they seem so neat and respectable and far from the people. But that night something happened to me. They read that Psalm from their Prayer Book – ‘But no man may deliver his brother, or make agreement unto God for him.”’

  She stopped talking and waited until Lucy met her eyes. “I knew God was talking directly to me,” she said. “And I knew the trouble with all of us is that we're trying to save ourselves by denying that simple fact. No man may deliver another from evil – only God can do it. And all of us keep right on killing ourselves by the sin of pride, all of us claiming we have a monopoly on deliverance – communists, socialists, democrats – all of us playing at being God.”

  Her voice was almost a whisper when she went on. “After that night I began taking instruction from Father Donovan. And last week I was admitted into the Church.”

  Lucy was studying Marcia now. In her expression she saw genuine contentment. “I'm so glad,” she said. “It's good to have one of us happy at last. I'm really very happy for you.”

  Tears showed in Marcia's eyes and she blinked them away. “It's no good telling Stephen. He'd only mock me. But I wanted to tell you. I thought, somehow, I might be able to help you. Only you're so – so proud and Protestant. Father says that the only morality Protestants understand any more is pride in being able to take it. You know, like Humphrey Bogart or Alan Ladd. And that's so barren – that good old American virtue of being able to take it on the chin. If you'd only let yourself go, Lucy! Let your emotions flow out and God will understand even if nobody else does. You've been hurt and you're bitter and you're too proud even to allow yourself to cry or talk about it.”