The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  He closed his eyes and again the tongue of darkness menaced him out of the red sky. He opened them again, fighting back this time. Did other men have nightmares while they were awake?

  What can I do? What can I do to make up for what I've done? And again: What can I do?

  He was completely alone. Maybe all the rest of them were alone, too. Maybe that was how those grim men in the walnut frames had fixed things in America – the minute you stopped to think where you were you found yourself alone. All right. Lucy had learned to live alone because he was the one who had shut her out, not the other way about. Now maybe he could learn to live alone, too. It was the only way to keep from dangling in the middle. What the hell difference did it make what anyone else thought about him, so long as he knew what to think about himself?

  The noises of another work-day morning grew louder in the streets below. Slowly, very gradually and slowly, Stephen's features steadied into firm lines almost Roman in their sombre dignity. Somewhere there was an answer to all this. A man couldn't let himself be a punching-bag forever.

  IT WAS the last Friday in August that Lucy came back from shopping one morning and found a letter from Marcia lying on the table in the hall. She dropped her packages in the kitchen and took the letter out to the garden to read it, knowing that Marcia wrote only when she had something to say. The tinkling sounds of a beginner at the piano drifted through the kitchen door. Before she opened the letter she looked about, and then she remembered that John and Sally were being watched by Uncle Matt.

  What Marcia had to say was there in the second line.

  Stephen has left New York. When Harper dropped the account Carl let Steve go. He'd left town several days before I heard about it, indirectly as a matter of fact, and when I phoned Carl to find out what it was all about I gathered there'd been a terrific row.

  All I've been able to find out for sure is that he was registered at the Blackstone in Chicago up to three days ago. Inference is that he and the Beaumont gal are washed up too because she's still around, and not alone.

  Sorry to send you news like this, but I'm not sure it's all bad. I only hope he hasn't decided to go on a long, long drunk. Carl implied that he had another job already, but he was too glib about that and I'm afraid I didn't believe him. I'd like to hope he was right.

  Try to remember what I said to you in Princeton. I'm not excusing Steve. But I think I understand him. It's not entirely his fault that he tried to make sex take the place of religion, for most of our generation at one time or another of our lives has tried to do the same.

  If you ever see Bruce Fraser again and I hope you do, remind him of a conversation he and I had one night years ago in a New York restaurant – about the well-meaning generation. He'll know what I'm talking about.

  I'm still at the hospital and if I could get off I'd come up to see you sometime, inimical as I might be to your life in Grenville.

  Bless you! Give John and Sally special hugs for me.

  Lucy lay back in the deck chair, looked up, and saw the first flush of colour in the apples overhead. Above the dark leaves of the tree, clouds were running like shaggy white horses across a sapphire sky. The wind was making a warm turmoil in the leaves, rushing humidly off the lake, and even here in the garden she could hear the waves volleying against the shore.

  She looked down at Marcia's letter, held in one hand against her thigh. And suddenly she became frightened, and a feeling of blind helplessness seemed to paralyze all her limbs. Then she was on her feet looking over the hedge into the Frasers’ garden where Bruce had set up a table and was making corrections in the script of the article he had finished at last. A pile of papers lay on the left side of the table under a heavy stone and he was bending over the remaining sheets with a pencil in his hands.

  “Bruce!” she said, surprised at the sound of her own voice.

  He looked up, stared at her a moment, then put the remainder of his script under the stone and rose. “Hello!” he said. “Anything the matter?”

  She slipped through the gap in the hedge and joined him. “I can't keep still this morning,” she said. “Will you come for a drive with me? No place in particular – so long as it's out of town.”

  “Love to. Just wait until I take this stuff into the house.”

  A minute later he joined her in the lane on the far side of the house where the station wagon had been parked all summer. She turned the car around and drove up to the King's Highway and then out of town, and as soon as she reached the open road she raced the car at seventy while her hair caught snatches of the wind. From time to time Bruce looked at her in quiet surprise. Finally she turned down a side road and stopped the car near an open stretch of the beach.

  “I'm crazy today,” she said. “But I couldn't stand it any longer at home.”

  They left the car and walked the beach to the water's edge. The waves were pounding in heavily and the wind whipped the spray in their faces and spattered their clothes. Brilliant sheens of sunlight as wide as fields tossed and flickered on the lake.

  “We'll get soaked if we stay here any longer,” Bruce said. He turned and walked back about twenty-five yards to rising turf, she stayed a moment longer by the water's edge and then joined him, careful when she sat down to be on his good side. Above their heads a gnarled pine sang in the wind.

  She reached into a deep pocket on the front of her linen dress and handed him Marcia's letter.

  “I'd like you to read this. I suppose I've been waiting for something like it all summer. It may explain why I – why I've been so difficult for you.”

  He turned from the wind as he read the letter, then handed it back, gave her a quick glance, and stared out at the tossing water.

  “What do you hear from Stephen himself?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “What in God's name is the matter with him?” Bruce kicked so hard with his heel that sand spurted out from under it. “Why should you be involved in this – this insensate American pattern?”

  “Never mind that,” she said. “So much of what has happened to Stephen is my own fault.”

  “I'm afraid I don't get it.”

  “I let myself be too proud. I let myself be hurt too easily. When he seemed to be drawing away from me, I drew away too. I shut him out when he needed me most, and my – my silence must have driven him nearly insane. You see – Stephen never had a religion – just as Marcia says. He isn't even able to get above a situation by thinking about it, the way you do. He has to deal with it. He has to – to feel it in his hands. Women are more necessary to him than they are to you, even though you're a poet and he's an engineer.”

  She lifted her head as the wind caught her hair; inner passion was plain on her face, and Bruce wondered why he had never realized she could be so formidable.

  His jaw set hard. “Don't be such a damn fool!” he said. “There's nothing you've got to blame yourself for. The divorce rate in the United States is one to four. What else does that mean except that –”

  “No, Bruce,” she said quietly. “No.”

  He looked down at the sand.

  “Marcia was divorced three times. Did you feel she was commonplace?”

  He flushed. “Of course not.”

  “Stephen and Marcia aren't small people, Bruce. They're both used to taking long chances.”

  What does she want of me, he thought. Why has she brought me out here? To get me to put a period after the conclusions she's already reached?

  “Stephen and I have different needs,” she said. “He gave me what I needed. I failed to give him what he required.” Her body seemed to contract as she drew up her knees and clasped them with her hands. “Stephen taught me not to be afraid of my own feelings. He unfroze my heart. He made me see that what counts is not what you keep yourself from doing, but what you do. And what did I give him in return? All I could do was to love him, and he needed so much more than that.”

  Bruce made no reply.

  “The other night af
ter we heard about the atomic bomb I began to think of the Americans the way you do – like a great mass of people and not as individuals. I saw them moving in a vast swarm over a plain. They had gone faster and farther than any people had ever gone before. Each day for years they had measured out the distance they'd advanced. They were trained to believe there was nothing any of them had to do but keep on travelling in the same way. And then suddenly they were brought up short at the edge of a precipice which hadn't been marked on the map. There they were with all their vehicles and equipment, jostling and piling up on the front rank. For of course the ones behind didn't know the precipice was there and couldn't understand why the ones in front had stopped advancing. The pressure from behind kept increasing on the front ranks and they were all shouting at each other so loudly nobody could hear anything.” She gave a quiet laugh, unclasped her knees and turned to look at him. “And there was Stephen himself, heaving and pushing without realizing the significance of what he was doing, in a rank not very far from the front.”

  The wind drummed past their ears and tangled Lucy's hair. Bruce passed his hand over his scar and rubbed his forehead. An unspoken hope, an expectation with which he had lived for years, never quite admitting it nor quite rejecting it, had finally resolved itself, become sharply visible, and now had disappeared.

  “What are you going to do?” he said quietly.

  She smiled as she looked at him. “I didn't know when I asked you to come here with me, but I do now. I'm going to him.”

  Bruce got to his feet and with a quick movement she rose with him.

  “I walked out on him,” she said. “And there's no reason why he should come to me.”

  Her eyes hadn't left Bruce's face. “Forgive me,” she said. Gently she kissed his lips, and then she added, “I know I've been unfair to you.”

  He stood looking at her, his face naked as she had never seen it. “No, you haven't. I've known all along how you felt.”

  He followed her up the bank toward the car. “A precipice,” he repeated to himself. “Does she think the Americans have a monopoly on that, too?”

  LUCY'S train reached the LaSalle Street Station shortly after seven-thirty in the morning. She checked her suitcase, walked out to the Van Buren Street entrance to get a taxi, and felt the dry heat reach for her lungs. Her first thought was for the ugliness of the section of the city before her eyes. Her next thought was for the people on the streets; they looked beaten by the hot air that had been lying in the Loop for days.

  “The Blackstone Hotel,” she said to the taxi driver when she got in his cab, but he was either too tired or too surly to acknowledge having heard what she said. The cab started with a jerk and she fell back on the warm leather seat. Bronze-coloured light filtered slantwise through the overhead trestles of the elevated tracks onto the tops of trucks and cabs pressing solidly up and down Van Buren. Since she had never been in Chicago she had no idea how long a ride she might have, and she began to wish she had eaten breakfast on the train. They crossed Wabash, the trestles turned and went off in another direction, and the sky seemed to open up ahead. When they reached Michigan Avenue the whole world opened wide. Sunshine flooded the avenue and the rest of the city seemed to drop off behind them in shadowy space.

  She paid the driver and went through the glass doors of the hotel into the lobby and the cool dignity of the building enfolded her. She was glad Stephen had chosen to stay in a place like this. But was he still here? That was the only thought in her mind at the moment.

  When she asked at the desk and was told he was still registered she found herself smiling at the clerk, hoping he didn't know how suddenly light-headed she felt.

  “I'm Mrs. Lassiter,” she said. “But he's not expecting me. I've just arrived from Canada. I –” She stopped because she realized it was barely ten minutes to eight and Stephen was probably not awake yet. In any case it was too early to talk to him. Nobody likes to be surprised before breakfast, Stephen as little as anyone. He always woke up hungry, and he was always inarticulate and short-tempered before he had eaten.

  She smiled again while the clerk watched her. “I'll go into the dining room,” she said. “I'll have you ring his room later on.”

  In the high-ceilinged, high-windowed restaurant she was shown to a table covered with a stiff, shining white cloth. She took off her gloves, inspected the menu on a smooth white card that was placed before her, and wondered how she was going to hide her nervousness. What if Stephen happened to walk in while she was eating? Would he be angry, as though she had been spying on him? She had no plans for meeting him, no set words to say. She had decided on the train to improvise from moment to moment once she found out where he was.

  She took her time over breakfast, trying to read the newspaper that had been placed beside her plate but looking up whenever a newcomer entered the room. But by nine-fifteen there had been no sight of Stephen. She paid her check, left the dining room, and went back to the desk.

  “Will you ring Mr. Lassiter's room now, please?”

  She waited while another clerk held a receiver to his ears. Finally he said, “The room doesn't answer. I believe Mr. Lassiter has already gone out.”

  “Oh!” She stood there trying to decide what to do. “I'll wait here for him,” she said. “You wouldn't know when he'd be back?”

  “He didn't leave any message.”

  She took a deep breath. “When he does come in, will you tell him I'm waiting in the lobby?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Lassiter.”

  She picked up a copy of the Tribune and found a chair from which she could watch the door. The minutes ticked by as she turned the pages. A woman had been murdered. American officers had surveyed the ruins of Hiroshima. Yugoslavia was threatening the United States. The Tribune was threatening England. Great Britain was not to be trusted. The Cubs had won another ball game. When Lucy reached the back page of the paper she laid it down and looked around the lobby. No one had walked through without her eyes finding him. She went to the newsstand, looked over the paper books, and bought a copy of The Late George Apley which she had been meaning to read for years.

  Elevators opened and people came out, doors opened and people came in, but none of them was Stephen. She was the only one sitting for any length of time in the lobby. Bellboys and a house detective were aware of her presence now. And her eyes still lifted automatically every time anyone entered the revolving doors.

  At ten-fifteen she put the book down, unable to concentrate on print of any kind any longer. She tried to think what Stephen would look like when she did see him. What kind of a suit would he be wearing in such heat? A new one, or an old familiar one? What kind of a hat? Or no hat at all? Now she found herself in sudden panic as she tried to recall his features. She had a sense of having forgotten entirely what he looked like. She could bring the image of Jane to her mind, of Bruce and Nina and John and Sally, but not Stephen. Why hadn't she taken a photograph with her when she left Princeton so hurriedly that day? If she had to sit here all day long and search the face of every strange man who crossed her path she would be a gibbering fool by evening.

  And then shortly before eleven o'clock Stephen came through the doors from the street. Just for a moment she saw his face, and the sense of familiarity was like seeing herself in the glass after days of being ill in bed. He went straight to the desk and began to talk to the new clerk who had come on duty at ten o'clock. She sat quite still as she was, watching.

  All the good things his face had ever meant to her began swarming into her mind – the way he had laughed in the falling snow that December day when they had first tried to ski, the expression of pride and anxiety when he was allowed in her room after John was born, his consternation over the first turkey he had had to carve on Thanksgiving, his adolescent grin when he stripped off his clothes and flexed his muscles for her admiration and appreciation, the set of his jaw as he used his strength and self-confidence to stand like a triple wall between herself and all the things
that had bewildered her in a strange country in the first few years of their marriage.

  He was still talking to the clerk, leaning sideways, his elbow on the desk, his profile toward the lobby while the clerk made a note on a pad. She saw then that many things had happened to Stephen's face since she had seen it last. More grey hair was visible along the temples, the lines about his eyes and mouth were deeper. He was tired, but above everything else she saw that it was a sad and thoughtful face, far less diffuse than it had been six months ago.

  She got to her feet and walked quietly toward the elevators. If the clerk at the desk did tell him she was waiting, she couldn't bear to have him turn around and find her there, in the sight of so many strangers and the house detective. This was a moment for which she had made no plans, but she hadn't meant it to take place in a hotel lobby. The suggestion of dramatics in what she was doing made her shudder.

  As he turned away from the desk she realized that the clerk had not delivered her message. Stephen was crossing the lobby toward the elevators, his head slightly bent, his mind busy with its own thoughts. She stood there, undecided what to do next, when an elevator door opened, three people got out, and Stephen stepped in. She followed him, but another man had moved in between them and still Stephen didn't look up, still preoccupied.

  The elevator stopped at the third floor after the man called his number, the man got out, and the doors closed again.

  “Ten,” she heard Stephen say.

  She could touch him if she reached out an arm. She took a deep breath, kept her voice low, and said, “Hello, Stephen.”

  His head came up and turned with a startled jerk. He saw her smiling shyly up at him, his eyes opened wide.

  “Good God!” he said, and one hand went out to lean against the wall of the cage.

  The elevator slowed quickly to a stop and the doors swung open.

  “Ten,” the operator said.

  Stephen stepped aside and let her precede him and the door swung shut behind them. The hall was perfectly still. One of his hands, she saw, was bandaged across the knuckles. The other went under her elbow and she could feel it trembling. He guided her down a hall, their feet soundless on the thick carpets. They turned a corner and she stopped while his key scraped in the lock of a door.