The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  She gave me back as good as I gave her in the matter of glances; her eyes were perfectly steady and as deep as the shadows behind her. “Professor Sayles, I should expect more self-control and judgment in a man who’s no longer a boy.” Anne moved then as though she’d been flicked with a whip, but Mrs. Walters never so much as glanced at her, and for my part I hope I did not give any sign of what I was feeling. Her voice when she went on was controlled, but there was something cold and light in it that was close to contempt. “I’m as sorry as you both are for this accident. But Mrs. Marcy died quickly and with no pain. There was nothing here in this life for her anyway. I’m sure she is happier at this moment than she has ever been before.” Something in my look must have warned her, for she added with what I still believe to have been sincere conviction, “Death isn’t the terrible thing most people make it out to be.”

  “Of course not,” I said and the pulse in my throat was so strong it partly choked me. “It’s hardly more important than a dropped stitch when you’re knitting, is it?”

  At that she got up and went to the window. When she finally answered, with her back toward us, her voice was smooth and low, but I was sure that there was some reason why she wanted to keep us from watching her face while she spoke. “I forgot,” she remarked, “that neither of you has faith or understanding. To you, what has happened to Mrs. Marcy must seem tragic and irrevocable. I am sorry for that.” For a while after that there was silence in the room and, when she spoke again, her voice was wholly different, strained, taut, as if some control over herself were slipping. “We are all tired and frightened,” she said. “It was my fault. I should not have let her go the rest of the way home alone. But when she was with me she seemed so perfectly natural . . .” She waited for one of us to make some comment, but Anne shook her head at me and we kept silent. “You must have seen how it was by our footprints . . . She was walking along like a person who was absolutely uninjured.” The inflection in her voice at the end of that sentence was too faint to be definitely questioning, but I knew that she expected one of us to reply. And with that knowledge I suddenly became curious as to why, exactly, she wanted us to speak. Did she expect some approbation for her caution in going part way home with Mrs. Marcy? Or—and I could not see where this thought led—did she want us to admit that we had seen the footprints?

  Anne had brightened at her words. “Yes,” she said eagerly, “that’s right. There are the footprints. Dick, that ought to help with . . . them—don’t you think? And with Seth Marcy, too.”

  “They’ll help,” I said and then added reluctantly, “but they won’t be enough to absolve us.”

  Mrs. Walters’ tone was edged with scorn. “You talk as if we were going to be tried for something.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I don’t know much about small towns, but I suspect we shall be tried and found guilty on every street corner.”

  “Nonsense. Guilty of what?”

  “Criminal negligence.”

  She confronted me angrily. “Are we back on that same old track?”

  “All right, Mrs. Walters,” I said, “if you’re tired of old subjects, here’s a new one. There’ll be a coroner’s inquest when they find the body. We’ll all be questioned then. And it’s going to be hard to answer some of those questions. Notably, why you didn’t go all the way home with Mrs. Marcy, and why one of us at least didn’t bother to go over later to find out how she was and whether she was all right.”

  “Inquest!” Her tone was short, as though the thought had jolted her.

  “But yes,” I answered. “So Anne’s thought about the footprints is a good one. It may help to clear your skirts.”

  Contempt and impatience were stamped on her face. “If both of you would stop talking as if I—as if we—were guilty of something, it would be at least sensible. I admit I hadn’t thought about the inquest, but after all it’s not going to do us any harm to be able to tell our story in public.”

  Anne and I let it go at that. I did not trust myself to say anything more to Mrs. Walters and she behaved as if the two of us were no longer in the room. She had turned back to her window. I wondered if the boat lights were still crawling back and forth across the invisible water. It was impossible to tell from her stance what she was seeing, if anything; her heavy body was simply at rest beside the window, bulking there without tension or an expressive line in it. After what seemed like—and may even have been—ten minutes, she turned away and passed us without a word. At the door to the room she paused and turned back toward us, the way actresses of the old school used to stop in their exits and turn back on the audience for one last line. “I’m going up again for a while,” she said. “Call me if you need me. There’s coffee on the stove if you want it or if anybody comes. I won’t take my clothes off, so I can come right down.” Neither of us answered, but I nodded. “And my advice to you both is not to sit round talking each other into a state of nerves. You both need sleep. They’ll make enough noise when they come.” Then she was gone. A stair tread creaked once when she put her weight on it and after that everything was silent.

  We sat together on the sofa. This time I did put my arm around Anne and from the way her head went down against my shoulder I knew she wanted it that way. After a short time she said, “Do you mind sitting here a while? I’m tired, but I can’t bear going into my room alone and I know I couldn’t sleep.”

  She was soft against me and the smell of her hair reminded me of the grass and the morning sun by the beach. “I’ll stick around as long as you want me to,” I said.

  “Thank you, Dick. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she said and then looked up at me. There were circles under her eyes, I saw with a quick contraction of the heart, but she was laughing. “And I’m glad to be back.”

  “Don’t do things like that to an old man,” I said.

  She stopped laughing and looked at me intently. “I suppose you are old, aren’t you? Twelve years older than I am. Well . . .?” She dropped her head against my shoulder again and sighed.

  We sat there together for a long time. After a while I got out my pipe and smoked it once, and then a second time. Anne used up several cigarettes, but most of the time she stayed with her head down, leaning against me while I thought about her, and about the mess we were in, and how much I wished things were different. I tried hard to be happy about one thing, which was that at least this business had brought Anne and me back together again in a single day. It might have taken weeks or months to recover our old intimacy without the pressure of disaster to bring us together. But the thought wouldn’t work. It ought to have been a good thing to feel glad over, but it simply wasn’t.

  That in itself interested me as a psychologist. I knew that I was fond of Anne, just as I had been when Helen was alive, and that the events of this long, incredible day had wiped out the constraint that would normally lie between two people who have been separated for years. I even had enough sense to know there was a good chance that I would ultimately find myself in love with her as well. The very feeling of her weight against me, the sensation of her warmth, the scent of her hair—these things were keenly present in my thoughts. But not as I wished they were, clear down into the center of myself. There was something underneath my awareness of Anne, something cold and inhibiting.

  They say that in Alaska the summer warms the surface of the land so that you can grow crops on it, but that underneath the ground is frozen even in August. That is something the way it was with me that evening in the living room of the house on Setauket Point. I think, if I had kissed her then and told her that I loved her, abrupt as it would have seemed under ordinary circumstances, she would have understood and responded to it. But I didn’t because I couldn’t. There was something in the way, the only thing, I suspect, that can come between a man and a woman when they love each other, and it was to lie between us not only then but later.

&
nbsp; The sundering thing was fear. You can love when you are cold, hungry, sad, swiftly frightened, even when you are otherwise bored, as honeymoons go to show, but not when you are afraid. And I was afraid.

  It was quiet in that room, unmovingly, oppressively, chillingly silent there and through the whole house. The faint hiss of the lamp-wick and the sounds of our breathing were the only ones in my ears. I knew that, because I was listening—nominally for the return of Seth Marcy and perhaps others with him. They would come here whether they found her or not; I was certain of that. But the noise of footsteps was not the only one in my imagination. There was that other sound, the thing we had heard as we ran across the meadow in the rain . . .

  It must have happened the very instant that Mrs. Marcy had fallen on the stairs. I wondered if it had really been the reason why she had slipped. There might be nothing more in the two things than coincidence, but I am not a strong believer in that kind of coincidence. No, there was some kind of connection and I was far from feeling certain that it was the obvious one. If people fell down stairs often when there was a . . . well, a clap of thunder . . . But they didn’t. And that hadn’t been a clap of thunder.

  My thoughts revolved around this point over and over again in futility. I would shut my eyes and try to think just what that sound might have been, and instead there against the lids I would see Julian and Mrs. Walters at the foot of the stairs, looking down at Mrs. Marcy. She had seemed small, lying there, like a bird that had run into a windowpane and stunned itself or broken its neck. Probably Mrs. Walters was right and she hadn’t had much of a life. Whatever it had been, it was over now. Perhaps that was, as Mrs. Walters claimed, a merciful thing . . .

  I jerked myself back from this kind of thinking with horror. Never before in my life had I entertained such a stupid and morbid notion as that death could be preferable to life—any kind of life, no matter how dismal. Although of course if Julian could actually prove that there was another life afterward . . . And that concept brought me up short. There must be something in the air of this house or in its silence to make me think in this maudlin fashion. Then I remembered how tired I was. That would account for every-thing—fatigue poisons in the blood.

  16.

  WE HAD a long wait that night, Anne and I, before anyone came to the house. Once I went to the back door and out along the road a short distance. But there were no headlights on it coming our way, though I could see that the Marcy house was still lighted. And straining my eyes in the blackness, I thought I could make out a cluster of yellow light flecks between me and it, far off to the right. That would be another party gone down to read the story in those footprints and look, as I had done earlier, at the cut bank and the black, silent sweep of the water against the shore. Remembering how it pressed in against the rock and ricocheted back and out again from the land, I felt a kind of horror. I am a good enough swimmer, but even fresh and uninjured, I should not have cared to go into the river where those footprints ended. I went back to Anne without a word and held her close again.

  It must have been long past two in the morning when a car finally did drive up to the house. The two of us had heard it coming—in spite of fatigue our ears were preternaturally sharpened—and we were standing on the back steps when it swept around the end of the barn and the headlights flooded blindingly over us. I felt like an insect pinned to a board.

  Whoever was driving brought the car to a sudden halt and switched the lights down to dim. There was the slam of a door and then, as the driver came between us and the headlamps, I saw to my surprise that it was a woman. All that I could tell about her at first was that she had thin legs and was wearing heavy, sensible oxfords. It was not until she was almost up to the steps where we were standing that I could get any idea of her beyond that.

  She was, I saw then, a woman of somewhere between forty and fifty, spare, erect, with the kind of long face and heavy nose that are supposed to be typical of the New England spinster. She had a bandanna of some sort tied over her hair and was wearing a tailored suit which was something short of fashionable. Her walk suggested that she used her legs for getting across country rather than fascination. And yet, there was nothing daunting or formidable about her. I liked the way she came over to us and did not begin speaking till she was on the steps.

  “Hello,” she said then, and her voice was open and quiet, grave but not somber.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “I’m Ellen Hoskins. Is my brother here yet?”

  “Why, no. I’m afraid I don’t know any Mr. Hoskins. Anne, do you?”

  “No,” said Anne, her voice sounding so cordial that I knew she liked this woman just as I had. “But that needn’t matter . . . I’m sure I’ve seen you in town. Will you come in?”

  The woman said “Thank you,” and came into the kitchen. “My brother Dan,” she told us, “is the sheriff.”

  Anne’s “Oh!” was less cordial.

  Miss Hoskins smiled. “But he’s quite human. He asked me to bring the car out here and wait for him. He ought to be along any minute.” She looked at us pityingly. “You must have had a horrible evening of it.”

  “Yes,” I said and then, moistening my lips, “have they found her?”

  She nodded.

  “Dead?” Anne’s voice was steady but faint.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  The news was no more than what we had both known we should have to hear sooner or later, but for all that it settled into my mind cold and hard. A sudden wave of sadness went over me—sadness and fear, as I had to admit to myself. I wondered what was going to happen now.

  Ellen Hoskins was looking round the kitchen. Her eye traveled to the lamp, still burning on the table, but it did not pause there. She surveyed the whole room quietly, as though it interested her. Its placid, shabby orderliness seemed to please her in some way and she nodded to herself. Anne and I looked at her with curiosity. It was hard to tell what she was, though if her brother were sheriff, presumably she belonged to Barsham Harbor. Still, I decided, not entirely. Her tweed suit, though old and unashamedly patched on one elbow, was well-tailored and I thought the brown sweater under it had probably come from England. There was something crisp and assured in her manner that was puzzling at first, until it occurred to me that it was business-like. Her hands, too, were not those of a housewife, country or town. Their fingernails were short and uncolored, but they were polished. And her shoes, though they were dark with age and wear and smeared here and there with mud, were definitely handmade.

  She drew a deep breath. “It’s good to get inside,” she observed. “Summer’s about over and the nights are cold.”

  Anne’s response was quick. “Would you like a cup of hot coffee?” “No, thank you. But Dan’ll be glad of one when he arrives. It’s been cold out on the water, I expect.”

  “Come on into the living room,” I said. “The places to sit in there are somewhat softer.”

  She grinned at that. “I can see you’re not from this part of the world,” she said and then added, “either of you.”

  “No,” I admitted and we went into the front of the house. Through the window at the end of the room I noticed that the night was now wholly black and empty. The lights had gone from the water.

  Anne drew a deep breath and said, as if the words hurt her throat, “They . . . they found her quickly, didn’t they? We thought it might take a long time.”

  Ellen Hoskins settled herself in the chair where Mrs. Walters had sat earlier that night and began to fish in a side pocket of her jacket. “There’s an eddy below Barsham,” she said matter-of-factly. “One of the men—Harry Miller his name is—happened to think that with the tide ebbing, if there was a body in the river, it ought to appear there. So he waited a while and finally found her.”

  “Oh.” Anne’s face was white and she sat down quickly on the sofa again.

  The sheriff’s sister watched her a moment and then produced a package of ten-cent cigarettes, extracted one, and lig
hted it. “It’s a horrible thing,” she said, and in spite of her casualness and unconcern her tone showed that she meant the adjective.

  “But you mustn’t think too much about it, Miss . . .?”

  “Conner,” I said and added, “My name’s Sayles. Richard Sayles.”

  She nodded as if our names interested her in some way. “Thank you. My point is that you ought to take this as quietly as you can. And don’t worry about Dan’s coming here to talk to you. It’s his job, of course, even in cases of accidental deaths.”

  “We understand that,” I said, with enough emphasis on the final word to make her smile.

  “But not me? Well, Dan’s a good sheriff but the sight of a pencil and a piece of paper is more than he can stand. He foists off the notes on me—when I’m home, that is.”

  “That must be interesting.” Anne was smiling again.

  “Sometimes.” Ellen Hoskins was noncommittal. “But a lot of it’s just hard work—or tragic.”

  “We’d all give a lot if this hadn’t happened,” I said into the pause that followed.

  “Seth Marcy is taking it hard,” she observed with what was too ladylike to be a sniff, “in spite of the fact that so far as I know he never did anything to make Elora’s life pleasant, or even tolerable.” Her manner changed. “But I should be careful if I were you, all of you. The people here are different from the ones you’re probably accustomed to. They’ll blame you for what’s happened.”

  “It wasn’t our fault.”

  “No, Miss Conner, but it is going to look that way to most of them. And then—” She broke off, abruptly, and put her head on one side. “I wonder what’s keeping Dan?”

  “Was he coming straight here?”

  “No, he was going to see Seth Marcy home and come on to talk to all of you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re not sleepy,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but you ought to be. You both look tired. And you, Professor Sayles, only arrived today. The train always tires me and probably it does you.”