The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Was that actually where he wanted to go? It was a little place Gail had discovered, where Povey Bartt played the piano, with Eddie Soper on the clarinet and Sol Gold on the drums. The real music never got loose there until after midnight. Gail said Bartt's was a new kind of jazz – a genuine white man's jazz, she called it, close to the New Orleans idiom, but under Bartt's hands it came out differently. Stephen had been down there only once before and had annoyed Gail by talking while Bartt played. She insisted the man was as important an artist as anyone you could hear in a season at Carnegie Hall. And maybe she was right. Anyway, it was a good place to go now, a place to sit and be alone and have nobody bother him.

  He paid the driver, went in, checked his coat at a hole in the wall where a dark face emerged from a faint yellow glow, and found a table near the band. The room was nearly dark, bare, ugly, and more than three-quarters empty on account of the rain. While he waited for his drink and a sandwich, a Negro improvised on the piano, playing an imitation Basie not quite good enough to pass for the original. Gail called this one of the places where the musicians worked for love and marijuana.

  The Negro finally slid away from the piano and the white men came in one by one, settled themselves at their instruments and began to play, taking their time, feeling their way into the music. A waiter appeared with a drink and a sandwich, put them on the table, and Stephen began to eat, noticing little change in the music since the coloured man had left, apart from the support of the clarinet and drums. And then, so gradually it was something he felt in the pit of his stomach, felt it lying there alive and moving, the loneliness began.

  He could hear it in the high trilling in the treble of Bartt's piano, the right hand poised like a five-beaked vulture over the same group of keys, endlessly poised while the left spent an infinite brooding patience as it beat out the rhythm, exploring fantastic harmonies which always promised to be something new but which always – cruelly, relentlessly, logically as fate – came back to where they had started as Bartt stripped away the delusion of hope and revealed that nothing had changed at all.

  Stephen stared up at him, saw the man's eyes bright with marijuana, saw how he needed it, the relapsed ease it gave his whole body, saw how he used it and made it work for him, how with the drug he could accept what he was doing and love it.

  The loneliness jetted out in piercing personal agony on Soper's clarinet. It was visible, it was something you could touch in the posture of Sol Gold crouched among his drums like a sharp-nosed animal confident in danger, the flaring lapels of his striped double-breasted jacket pointing upward to his narrow shoulders, the shoulders marking time in contemptuous nonchalance, vast Asiatic eyes deep and softly smiling on either side of his great hook of a nose.

  Stephen finished his drink and beckoned the waiter for another one. He was mindless; the music had saturated him. Now every whorehouse and station hotel and backroom from Utica to Flagstaff was present in that half-dark box of a place, was displayed as if under glass in the arc-lighted bareness of Stephen's mind, every whorehouse, station hotel, and saloon in the dead hours of the morning when time stops and the continental night pales before the morning stars and the whistles of freight trains wail from town to town across the American plain. Cones of light shine down over the green baize of the crap game. Cones of light make the poker table a phantasmal altar. Rows of bottles brood behind the bar under the mirror that reflects Custer's Last Stand from the opposite wall, while the hard-faced men, every face with its own variety of the same expression, sit above shirt sleeves and loosened collars in organized disorder. They have been there for hours. A single waiter shuffles about soundlessly refilling their glasses, the dice rattle in the box, flash white on the green and stare up at the light with black eyes. The cards shuffle, the spittoon splashes over. Upstairs the springs of three brass beds jingle steadily while a brakeman, a telegrapher, and a traveller in women's hosiery silently fornicate three girls whose names they do not know except by the framed pictures which hang above each bed – September Morn, Rosebud, Salome. Downstairs there is a roar as someone is given the hotfoot, a loose laugh, and through the light-cone at the card table a voice snaps, “Pipe down you sonofabitch.” The door leading upstairs opens and the brakeman comes in; he looks relaxed and easy, pushes back a cowlick from a moist forehead and grins knowingly as he slumps over to the bar. His pants tighten across his fat buttocks as he sets his elbows.

  Stephen closed his eyes and clutched the glass in front of him, lifted it and poured the rest of the drink down his throat, opened his eyes again and beckoned to the waiter. Then he stared straight ahead at the musicians as the waiter went off with the empty glass.

  It is three o'clock in the morning. Where is it three in the morning, aside from a worn old song? Everywhere. The loneliness is all there is, Bartt's piano has captured it all and translated it into Stephen Lassiter's soul. It is three o'clock in the morning and suddenly the wooden timbers of the back room begin to tremble as a freight on its way from Evansville to St. Louis crashes through the town, the whistle wails four times for the crossing where the Ritz Cafe faces across Main Street to Hergesheimer's hardware, the empties rattle out of town and silence again, silence creeping like white mice out of the plain into the open streets of the wooden town. And at that moment an American boy looks up from the crap game with his hands in his empty pockets and a dream in his eyes. No words, he never needed them and he never will, only the dream in his eyes as he listens to the train and wishes to God he were with it, wishes he were out of this town and guesses it's time for the road again, maybe St. Louis, maybe Chicago, who knows but maybe New York itself, maybe this is the break, the apartment high above the Christmas-tree lights of Park Avenue and the limousine waiting below, the girl, and the top of the world.

  From the piano Povey Bartt tells it all because he has seen it all already: the American boy with the dream in his eyes. Bartt sees him thirty years from now with the pouches under his eyes, without the dream but still with the hope, here in the same backroom on the fringe of the light-cone where the tobacco smoke is rising. And Bartt knows the skill of all these men and loves them for it: their skill with cards, with electric wires, with jumping pistons and turning wheels, their skill with anything lifeless their hands can touch, and he sees that their skill is part of the vastness of the continental loneliness that bred itself into the seed their fathers and grandfathers carried about from town to town along with the knowledge that there is nothing they or anyone else can do about it, nothing but what the freight train does, go on and on and on until it stops in another town exactly like the one it left. And Bartt loves them. He knows them and they know him, for he is with them and always has been, and without him where is their meaning? He was with them when the Conestoga wagons rolled westward out of Council Bluffs, he was down in the Lehigh Valley when Lil met Sawed-off Pete, he was in San Francisco when the earth trembled under the cribs. When the cops come in to break it up he will be there, his left hand weaving the heartbeat of the bass to the shrill pain of the quivering right, and his rhythm will continue as long as America does, for when he dies, another will be there in his place.

  One close look at Povey Bartt shows he is dying now. He is small, hollow-chested, with high cheekbones and a flush over the bones, black hair parted in the middle but still stiff and untamed, his face a white and smiling triangle over the keys, over the gentle, wise brooding hands with the signet on the fourth finger of the left.

  “Waiter, what time is it?”

  “Four-twenty. It's four o'clock in the morning.”

  Stephen got to his feet and rubbed his eyes, staggered and leaned his head against the side wall. The beating in his head – was it the liquor or his blood pressure? Or was it that goddam music that never stopped?

  LUCY lifted her head as she heard the carillon ringing in the tower of the Graduate College and she smiled because she recognized the tune it was playing, one of its old standbys – The British Grenadier.

  She
ran downstairs and turned on the radio to listen. The war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead.

  “John!” she called. “John!”

  He came running in from the kitchen. “Yes, Mummy?”

  “Get Sally and come and listen. The war's over in Europe. Isn't it wonderful? It's a day you'll always remember.”

  In a few minutes John was back holding Sally by the hand, and they sat in front of the radio while Lucy listened to a news report. The network took them to London, to Paris, and back to Washington. Sally had no interest in what the voices were saying, but she watched John and her mother, and tried to imitate their rapt attention. A senator gave a patriotic address, a band played martial music, and in all the time they listened nobody mentioned the name of Canada.

  “We always win, don't we, Mummy?” John said.

  Lucy was startled by the significance of the pronoun, and her answering smile was for herself. Of course Americans always won and of course John was an American.

  “Will Daddy come home today?”

  “I don't know, dear. Perhaps he'll telephone. He's still very busy, you know. The war isn't over in the Pacific yet.”

  When John grew bored and Sally followed him out to the garden to play, Lucy felt an insistent longing to talk to someone. This was no day to spend alone. She wondered if it would be an impertinence to walk over to see the Hunters, but the moment she thought about it she realized they would be somewhere on Nassau Street by now. Should she get the children and drive into Princeton, too? But surely Stephen would come home, or at least call her on a day like this!

  She telephoned Marcia and had to wait for nearly twenty minutes for the call to go through on the crowded switchboards. When she finally got the hospital she was told Marcia was not there.

  “John!” she called at the side door. “Sally! Come on in and wash your hands. Let's go into town and see what's happening.”

  The children tumbled after each other up the stairs and she heard John talking excitedly in the bathroom while she brushed her hair in the bedroom. They all went down the stairs together and the two children climbed in beside her in the station wagon. As they drove out to the pike they met three soldiers on the corner and she stopped to offer them a lift. They were only boys, she realized when they clambered into the back seat, far more interested in talking to John and Sally than they were to her.

  Even before she reached the war memorial she saw that Nassau Street was going to be crowded. She let the boys out and then had to drive more than a block down Alexander Street before she found a place to park. She walked slowly back toward Nassau Street through the campus with John and Sally following behind. An excited young naval ensign appeared in her path and threw his arms about her neck. He began to kiss her exuberantly as John and Sally stopped with their mouths open to watch. When he saw the children he drew back abruptly.

  “Are these yours?”

  “Yes.” She smiled at him as she took one of the children by each hand.

  He bowed with extreme dignity. “If I may say so, ma'am, you're very deceptive for the mother of two.”

  He accompanied her as far as the street, where he recognized a friend and left her.

  Stephen ought to be here, she thought. Today of all days he should have come home. He'd love this. Will his not coming home today mean that he doesn't intend to come home at all?

  But here on Nassau Street, surrounded by so many eager Americans united by common feelings and memories, Lucy began to feel herself an outsider, a stranger in a country she hardly knew at all. She began to wonder how Grenville was behaving today. The United States had passed through three and a half years of war. Canada had endured nearly six. Yet she knew as clearly as though she were there that the mood of Canada on such a day, no matter what its outward manifestations, would be different from the mood here. It would be more private. Canadians were probably the only people in the world who neither envied nor resented the United States. They knew that in the eyes of a powerful neighbour, a small country such as theirs seemed very much as a poor man seems to the rich. If he manages his own affairs and keeps quiet, he is dull; if he doesn't, he affords an opportunity for charity. The only possible way for a poor man or a small country to appear interesting is to commit a crime on a scale calculated to impinge on the rights of the rich. Lucy smiled to herself.

  “Mummy, can Sally and I have an ice cream soda in Renwick's?”

  “If we can get in we'll all have one.”

  She worked her way down the sidewalk, holding Sally by the hand while John darted ahead, but her mind was still far from Nassau Street. She could see Jane at the console of the organ in St. David's, striking the first chord for a “God, Our Help in Ages Past.” She could hear Dr. Grant's voice recording the end of Hitler in cosmic terms: “O Lucifer, Son of the Morning, how art thou brought low to the ground!” She could see the veterans of the old war marching to the memorial, each with sons in Holland or Germany, each remembering personally those awful and legendary names which would always be a part of the texture of Lucy's childhood in Grenville – Vimy, Arras, Saint-Julien, Lens, Cambrai, and Passchendaele. At home today everyone in the church would know exactly what each family had gained or lost by the war, as people in a small place always do, and on a day like this some of their suppressed warmth would overflow. Princeton was a small town, too, but since the war it had become a town of strangers – the university filled with naval men from every state in the Union, houses filled with commuters who had been unable to find apartments in New York.

  They reached Renwick's and managed to find seats near the door. As Lucy sat down she noticed one of Stephen's friends at the fountain. When he saw her he got up and came over.

  “Where's Steve?” he said. “We're going to celebrate. Tell him to give me a call.”

  “It looks as if he got caught in New York and couldn't get out.”

  “Well, there's plenty of liquor in New York, but he's missing something if he doesn't get out here. This is a wonderful place, you know. If I could earn a living here you couldn't drag me into New York.”

  When they went out to the street again they stood on the curb and watched the crowds. A group had started to sing; and soon a whole section of Nassau Street was singing with them. This remarkable, unpredictable country, Lucy thought. It can change like lightning from cold and ruthless efficiency to open-hearted laughter and never consider itself inconsistent in the process.

  With a child by either hand she began to thread her way across the street. Halfway across, a strange man picked up Sally and lifted her to his shoulder.

  “On a day like this,” he said, “there's nothing I'd sooner do than carry a little girl. Wish I had one just like her. Besides, she can see better up here.”

  He kept her on his shoulder all the way across the campus to the car on Alexandria Street, then touched his hat, and went back the way he had come.

  “What shall we do now?” Lucy said to the children. “Drive around to the other end of town or go home?”

  “Let's go home,” John said. “Maybe Daddy will telephone to us.”

  She was preparing their lunch when the reaction set in. Suddenly she was depressed and lonely and some of her depression infected John while they were eating. She tried to smile and make him laugh, but John was so sensitive to the moods of his parents that concealment was of little use. What would happen in a year, or for that matter in a few weeks or months when he found out for himself the true situation in his own house?

  For an hour after lunch Lucy occupied herself with the usual dreary routine of housework while the children took naps in the nursery. Her hands were in dishwater when she looked up and saw her face in the mirror that hung over the sink. The expression she encountered shocked her, and when the shock wore away she realized that she had reached her limit. Slowly and carefully she emptied the dishpan, cleaned the sink, and dried her hands.

  “This is impossible,” she said aloud. “It's stupid and degrading. What's the matter with me? I'm a
shamed of myself.”

  As though the song she had heard the crowd singing in Nassau Street were still ringing in her mind, calling it forth from the numbness of the past weeks, clearing her thoughts for action, she was able to stand apart and look at herself with fresh understanding. A suggestion of a spontaneous smile moved over her lips. She stacked the dishes on a rack, poured steaming water over them, and walked out of the kitchen. She stood still in the hall for a moment, then went upstairs. In the bedroom she opened a drawer in her dressing table and took out a billfold. Nearly all the month's housekeeping allowance was in it still. Then she went into the nursery. John was sitting up in bed looking at a picture book and Sally was just waking out of her sleep.

  “How would you like to go for a long drive?” she said, smiling at them. “A drive that would take maybe two whole days.”

  “Where, Mummy?” John dropped his book.

  “How would you like to go up to Canada? You've never seen your Aunt Jane and she'd very much like to see you. We could leave this afternoon if we're quick about it. And drive up in the station wagon. Aunt Nina might even be there if she's out of the Navy. You'll like her.”

  “Will we see the lake? The one you told us about?”

  “We'll live right beside it, almost.”

  “Is it really and truly bigger than Lake Carnegie?”

  “It's so big you can get into a ship and sail straight out from Canada and sail for hours and hours before you even see the United States on the other side.”

  John looked dubious and Sally laughed because she thought his frown was funny. “It would be the sea if it was that big,” he said.

  “Shall we see how quick we can all be?” Lucy said. Sally began to sense that something was going to happen. “John – you go down and put your wagon in the garage while I dress Sally. Then I'll pack while you get dressed.”