The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Lucy let her gaze go to a green copse on a distant rise of land. As Marcia went on talking her mind began forming another picture: three hundred years ago in a Suffolk village the first American ancestor of Marcia and Stephen, plain and hard-handed, refusing to doff his cap to the squire, obsessed by the conviction that if he allowed any authority to stand between himself and his God his soul would be irrevocably lost, going down by night to the tidewater with a few other stubborn, proud men like himself, secretly boarding the tiny, worm-eaten vessel, with scurvy and months of the Atlantic and years of the wilderness before them – but in the mind of that ancestor the beacon words which had brought Martin Luther face to face with Charles the Great and had fired a handful of peasants and craftsmen to open and break a new continent” – “Here I stand alone. So help me God, I can do no other!” And now after three centuries, as though a fire which had lighted the world had suddenly gone out, Marcia had renounced all that her forebears had stood for by going back to incense and authority and the high altar, led by an Irish priest from the streets of New York.

  Turning her eyes back to Marcia's face, Lucy knew that her act had been inevitable, for Father Donovan was the only person Marcia had met in her whole life who had given her hope.

  “I can't bear to have you grow bitter,” Marcia was saying. “When you first came down here, and especially after John was born, you had something I've never found in anyone else. If it hadn't been for you I don't think I'd have been ready to listen when I met Father Donovan. You have a quality in your nature that I can't help thinking of whenever I try to understand what the Church means when it talks of grace.”

  But Lucy was no longer with her and Marcia knew it. Still, she had to finish what she had come to say.

  “Steve's a fool and he's weak and he's acting like a heel, but he's a lost man if you don't stand by him, because you're the only decent thing he's ever had in his life. At least he recognized the goodness in you when he met you. And perfect people don't need help, Lucy.”

  A wistful expression appeared to cross her face. “You know, you have to be very wrong, you have to wound yourself and be completely lost and abandoned and then forgiven before you can see God. When you're in the depths – when the very thought of yourself disgusts you – when you feel yourself trapped at the bottom of a deep, slimy well – that's when a miracle can happen. You see a patch of light a long way off and the light spreads and becomes golden and the sun rises and you look around and suddenly you realize it's a beautiful morning.” She hesitated and her voice was like a schoolgirl's. “You know – I used to be far worse than Stephen.”

  But Lucy was still incapable of talking about Stephen to anyone, even to Marcia who had become her best friend.

  “It's not that I've stopped loving Stephen,” she said. “It's just that he doesn't want me. It's as simple as that and I haven't yet found a way to live with that fact.”

  “I don't believe it, you know. He still loves you as much as he ever did.”

  “He's afraid of hurting me. And that's not the same as love.”

  “Has he asked for a divorce?”

  Lucy gripped the arms of her chair and closed her eyes. “No. He just doesn't come home any more. I stay here with the children because I don't know what else to do.”

  “If he doesn't come home it's only because he's ashamed of himself. He's accustomed to women who throw hysterics and tell him loudly and specifically what they don't like about him. Mother was that way and so was Joyce. Your silence makes him more ashamed than they ever did or ever could.”

  “Please, Marcia – I don't want to talk about it. I know I've failed him, somehow, but I can't change my own nature, any more than he can change his. Yet if I knew what the real trouble is I'd do anything on earth to help get rid of it. Sometimes I think he's just fallen mechanically into the routine so many men of his age follow in New York. Sometimes I think there's a drive in his subconscious that makes what he's doing now a real necessity to him. If that's so, I'll have to learn to live without him. But I'm not sure. I'll have to be sure before I'll know what to do.”

  Marcia looked at her closely. “You'd be sure if you'd known Mother. Steve's been hunting female approval ever since he left home. He got it there, but only on and off.”

  “Do you really believe it's as simple as that? Because I don't.”

  “Look at that gang he works with! Steve's the kind of man who has to be liked by everyone around him, and the only way to make a heel approve of you is to be more of a heel than the rest of the crowd.” She answered Sally's wave by raising her arm over her head. “Damn us Americans! Why do we have to insist on everyone's liking us no matter what kind of people they are?”

  Sally came across the lawn toward them, a snail held out on the palm of her hand. It was moist, pinkish white with a blob of wet earth on its shell. She presented the snail to Marcia with a smile, and Marcia explained what it was and how long it took a snail to move from place to place and what its shell was for. Sally listened intently and then returned to the sandpile, taking the snail with her.

  For several minutes neither woman spoke. Then Marica's face brightened. “Do you remember the time your friend from Grenville, Bruce Fraser, came to New York?” she asked.

  Her choice of a change of subject made Lucy smile, made her think, too, that Marcia's essential nature had changed less than Marcia believed it had.

  “You mean that night we all went to dinner and he drank too much?”

  “Did he? It was such a heedless night. My second-last night as a practising pagan. Bruce helped me, you know. But that wasn't what I was thinking about. I was remembering that it was the night he fell in love with you.”

  Lucy felt laughter rising in her throat, and surprisingly it was warm and good. “With me? But Marcia, Bruce has known me all his life!”

  “What if he has? That night he fell in love with you. I saw it happen.”

  “He was excited at being in New York, that was all. Every thing Bruce feels shows in his face.”

  Marcia looked down at her hands; they were no longer milk-smooth and cared for, but hard and competent as a kitchen maid's. “I saw him the next night, too, you know. And being the bitch I was, I seduced him.”

  Lucy accepted the confidence with no outward emotion. “Did you? I'm rather glad for his sake. Do you ever hear from him now?”

  “No, I'd be the last person in the world he'd write to. I spoiled something for him. I spoiled the way he was thinking about you and then he blamed himself rather than me. Strange people you are – both of you. Are you all like that where you come from – shy and self-critical and under the surface as passionate as hell? How old is he now?”

  Lucy thought a moment. “Thirty-one.”

  “And he's the kind of man who could never possibly be converted to the Church.”

  Lucy laughed again. “You're right about that.”

  “Oh, well, I wasn't serious. He's thirty-one and I'm thirty-six and don't I ever look it!”

  She did look it. The excitement and lost sleep of her twenties had recoiled on her, and the war work and long hospital hours had added further marks of their own. Her black hair was no longer glossy and there were lines about her eyes and mouth, though she was still a handsome woman. Lucy thought the most noticeable change in Marcia had taken place when she stopped dressing to attract attention.

  She got up from the white garden chair and stretched in the sun, holding her arms wide as if to clasp the whole garden and countryside within their circle.

  “We should see more of each other,” she said. “You and I get on so terribly well. It's a grim world when people who like each other never see each other any more and those who loathe each other can't get out of sight. I'll tell you what let's do – you never use half your gas ration. Let's take the station wagon and go over Washington's Crossing and up the other side of the Delaware. We can have tea or something in Lumberville. I used to know a lovely place there. We can get back by dark. Let Shirley give
the children their supper.”

  “All right,” Lucy said. “That sounds a fine idea.”

  She went into the house for the car keys, came out, and spoke to Sally and handed Marcia a light coat. It seemed strange to be going off on an impulse like this; for days she had stayed close to the house in the hope that Stephen might call again.

  As she opened the door of the garage Marcia looked at her strangely. “Tell me something,” she said. “Do you ever hear from your older sister? She's still living in your old home, isn't she?”

  “Yes.” She hooked the door back against the wall and went in to the car. “I had a letter from her only a few days ago. It was the first she's written since I was married except for the letters she always sends at Christmas.”

  After Lucy had backed out, Marcia got into the car and slammed the door on her side. “Do you miss her very much?” she said.

  Lucy made no answer as she swung the car about and headed up the road. Finally she said, “It must have been telepathy that made her write now. I've been thinking about her a lot lately. As Stephen says when I get on his nerves, the Scotch are a funny people.”

  Looking at the line of Lucy's jaw, Marcia thought she could imagine how Stephen must have felt about her sometimes. But while she looked, the lines of Lucy's face softened and her expression changed.

  “I think Jane really wants to see my children,” Lucy said.

  RAIN was falling in New York. It was slapping the windows and washing off pavements into gutters, and as the Madison buses hissed to a stop at every other corner black clusters of people darted out of arched doorways of office buildings to crowd into them. In the Village the cobbles glistened darkly under the lights and a small fume of steam drifted over the open counter of a Riker's stand in Sheridan Square.

  Stephen walked out of Gail Beaumont's apartment building and turned up his collar against the rain. His face looked haggard as he stopped under a light and struck a match to a cigarette. He flicked the match away, walked a block to the subway entrance, then tossed away his cigarette and descended. The platform was silent and empty and his wet feet made marks on the cement as he walked up and down waiting for the train. A hard rumble of moving steel poured out of the tunnel at him, he saw the lights of the train growing, and deliberately stood within two feet of the platform edge as it crashed by. The doors gaped open, he stepped in and slumped onto a wicker seat. It was a slack hour and the car he was in was almost empty. He laid his dripping hat on the seat beside him and looked up the car to a tiny old man asleep in the far corner. He wondered if the man were riding the subway simply to keep out of the rain.

  Stephen leaned back and closed his eyes. Christ, of all the nights for Gail to run out of liquor! The train crashed onward uptown. Half a dozen people got out at Penn Station but Stephen did not open his eyes.

  Was it Monday or Tuesday? It must be Monday. Then it was eight days since he had seen Lucy, and he couldn't have gone home over the past weekend if he'd wanted to. Without warning Myron Harper had summoned him to his place in Maryland on Friday and he'd phoned Lucy to tell her where he was going, but nobody answered the phone. Well, what difference would it have made if she had answered it? In her place he wouldn't have considered the Maryland story a likely one.

  The noise of the train drowned out the sound of his heavy breathing. Why did a man always have to make his discoveries too late? This was his second marriage and it had taken him seven years to find out what was wrong with it. Lucy wasn't like Joyce. Joyce was a bitch and he'd been nothing more than a kid when he married her. Lucy was different. She was too good for comfort. And somehow or other she had worked her way right into his mind and there she sat watching, knowing what he was about to do even before he knew it himself, caring too much, wanting too much of him. And why?

  The train slowed down for Times Square and he opened his eyes and got to his feet. No matter what he did, no matter how he lived, Lucy would have to learn to stand on her own feet and not pin her entire happiness onto him. No man could stand a burden like that. No man. Could he help being the kind of man he was? Was he worse than anyone else he knew?

  The train stopped and he threaded the maze to the Grand Central shuttle. Ten minutes later he was riding up to his office in the elevator, joking with the operator, feeling a sudden lift of spirit as he realized that for three hours he would be alone, solitary with his work.

  He unlocked the door of his private office, switched on the light, hung up his wet hat and coat, took off his jacket, loosened his necktie, and slumped into the chair behind his desk. Before him were piled the papers he had left there in the afternoon, reflecting light from a horizontal lamp.

  He was glad to be alone.

  He pulled open a drawer and took out a half-empty bottle of bonded bourbon. After unscrewing the cap he remembered that he had no glass and went out to the water cooler for a paper cup. He came back with three in each hand, the set in his left hand filled with water, each cup to within an inch of the brim. He poured himself a drink and tossed it off, refilled a cup and set it beside him on the desk. A warm glow began to radiate through him.

  For three hours, broken only by the moments when he refilled a paper cup with whiskey and water, Stephen worked. His mind seemed to him to be clear and decisive, but when he finished the job he had set himself he felt drained. It was forty minutes past midnight. He rose and stretched, poured himself another drink and replaced the bottle in the drawer. The rain was still washing the windows and it still felt good to be alone. To hell with the war and to hell with everyone! Let them huddle like beetles in doorways to keep out of the rain. When you were alone you didn't care. That's what Carl was always talking about – he'd learned it young. When you were alone you were free. Only one night-shift elevator operator was in this whole building now, besides himself. To be alone, to be bound to nobody, to do what he liked and not have every swing counted for a strike-out!

  He went out to the files in the outer office, hearing his shoes loud on the linoleum of the big room, and returned with a pile of back numbers of his own displays. He laid them on the desk and drank the whiskey that was left in the cup while he leafed through them, trying to recall the feeling of excitement that each one, at least at one stage of its development, had given him. It was strange that someone like himself could have turned into an able man at this kind of job. Carl insisted that no man chose his job; the job chose the man. But advertising wasn't his real job. He hadn't been selling the Privateer through his skill and ingenuity. Hitler had been its real salesman. He had merely been its celebrator, showing America what it meant to have citizens and techniques which could produce a plane of such power.

  As Stephen continued to examine his past work a sense of disenchantment grew. These displays with their balanced legends, their over-simplifications, were an insult to the genius and mind-breaking work that Myron Harper and his men had put into their plane. He remembered the room in the Maryland plant where models of every fundamental part of the Privateer were laid out on plastic shelves and tables in order that engineers could pick them up and study them at will. Whenever there was a discussion involving the improvement of any part of the plane, Harper insisted on having a model of the part on the conference table. “Unless you can see and handle a thing,” Harper said, “you can never understand it. You can never see how simple the problem is or how difficult it is. My business is making things, and things aren't made with ideas. They're made with hands or with the machines men have invented to take the place of their hands.”

  If only he had met a man like Myron Harper when he was twenty!

  Stephen's mind veered back as it inevitably did to his part in the war. Well, there were others who had done less. It was something to have given the public at least a crude idea of what Harper had done for engineering and his country. No single aircraft in the United States Air Forces except the B-29s and the earlier Forts had become so well known as the Privateer and that was largely because of work done in this office. He lo
ved those shark-nosed, deadly, beautiful instruments. And he knew them so well he could almost make a blueprint of one from memory. He knew how a good pilot would feel about his Privateer.

  As he returned the displays to the files he wondered for the hundredth time what was going to happen to the account. The Privateer was already outmoded and Harper was talking about jets.

  Maybe the real question was not what was going to happen to the account but what was going to happen to Harper himself. Give him another ten years like the past five and he would be producing guided missiles which could be sent from Maryland to Tokyo in a couple of hours. But the government would have to come through with some solid subsidies, or Harper would be finished just at the moment when he was ready to show the world what he could really do.

  Well, no matter what happened to Harper, this account, bred of excess war profits, was living on borrowed time. When it was closed, could he stand working at the agency on a routine luxury account? He closed his eyes and yawned. Even the thought of it made him sick. What about the Shasta Dam job Lucy had wanted him to take? And leave New York? Exchange Shasta for Gail? What was the matter with New York, for Christ's sake? Was it his fault if Lucy hadn't been able to adjust herself to life down here? The United States set the pace for the world. The world could take it or leave it. He had to take it himself, didn't he? Gail had to take it. God damn it, a hundred and forty million Americans took it – and liked it.

  As he put on his hat and coat and snapped off the lights he knew he was tired and he also knew he would not be able to sleep for hours. He stepped into the elevator, dropped to the ground floor, and walked out into the rain. A few taxis were swishing up Madison and their sound made him think how wonderful New York could be on a rainy night when you were alone with the buildings in the long empty streets. He felt good again, eager to go somewhere and do something. What? It was too late to go back to Gail, for she was sure to be asleep already. He caught a taxi cruising downtown and gave the driver an address in the Village.