The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  He prowled restlessly around the room and soon discovered many indications of a male personality. He flipped open a silver cigarette box, held a cigarette between thumb and forefinger while he closed the box, and examined the inscription on the cover. It was a trophy won by Lassiter in 1927 for men's singles in a closed tournament at a Long Island club. There was an extremely awkward silver bowl with heavy knobby handles which he supposed was another trophy. On a small side table was a Dunhill pipe, and on the wall opposite was an old portrait, with cracked canvas, of a truculent man with bushy eyebrows.

  Lucy came back while he was looking at the picture. “One of Stephen's ancestors on his mother's side,” she said. “He was a brother of one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Can't you just feel him disapproving of us?” She slipped her arm through his. “Do sit down! You must have been walking all day long. When I first came to New York I was tired for months.”

  He sat down on the sofa and watched her as her eyes went to the white wing on his uniform curling upward out of the N which indicated his navigator's status.

  “God, you're lovely!” he said. “Forgive me for being blunt but I can't help it. Are you as happy as you look?”

  “I think so.”

  “No reservations?”

  “I stopped making reservations the day I left home.”

  He smiled. “I stopped making them the day I enlisted.”

  The maid entered bearing a tray containing a decanter of rye whiskey, one of Italian vermouth, glasses, a thermos bowl full of ice cubes, a pitcher, a small bowl of cherries, and a spoon. She set the tray on the table and left without a sound. Lucy rose and Bruce joined her at the table, and as she picked up the decanter of rye she gave him a rueful smile.

  “Does it seem ages ago since the night when you came home from Montreal and I couldn't even give you a glass of beer?”

  “Eons ago.”

  She measured vermouth into the pitcher while Bruce picked up the cherries and dropped one into the bottom of each glass.

  “An American chap in the squadron told me to be sure to drink at least a dozen manhattans a day while I was in New York. He says this is the only place in the world where they're any good.”

  “That's what Carl Bratian says, too.”

  “Bratian?”

  “Stephen's boss in the agency. He's the main reason why we're living in New York. He's an old classmate of Stephen's and he persuaded him to drop his engineering work and go into advertising. You'll be meeting him tonight.”

  “Will I like him?”

  “You might. You've always liked clever people.”

  She stirred the mixture slowly until it became a murky amber under the light. She told him that their friends were mostly people like themselves, hardly any of them native New Yorkers, some they had met at parties, others business acquaintances. Stephen made a point of avoiding his relatives.

  “Do you miss your garden?” he asked.

  She picked up her glass and went back to the sofa. “Terribly.” And at once she changed the subject. “You'll be meeting Stephen's sister tonight, Marcia Stapleton. She's a grand person.” Lucy turned her head as she heard a noise in the hall, but it was only the maid getting something out of a closet. “Stephen should be home by now. He promised to be early, but he can never really plan his time. Something always seems to be turning up.”

  Bruce was still too restless to sit still. Glass in hand, he walked across the room. The gold damask drapes covered the windows, but he slipped his hand into the place where they met together and drew them slightly apart. The alcohol he had drunk earlier was quick in his veins, he was physically tired, and his mind was racing. New York was a vast explosion of light against the gathering darkness. In the middle distance was a splash of red from a neon sign, and as he watched the spectacle he felt a hot stab of desire. He turned from the window and let the gold damask fall into place.

  “It's incredible!”

  “What is?”

  “New York. It's even bigger than the war.” He went back to the sofa, sat down, and looked at his black service shoes. Lucy was watching him calmly, perhaps finding him as changed as he was finding her. “How old is John now?” he said.

  “Almost a year.”

  “May I see him?”

  “Of course you may. I try not to show him off if I can help it, but I'm really terribly proud of him. Molly's feeding him now. Wait till Stephen comes home and then we'll all go in to see him.”

  Bruce sipped his drink and smoked, but his nerves remained tense.

  “Tell me about Grenville,” Lucy said quietly.

  “I probably don't know any more than you hear yourself.”

  “Nina only writes occasionally, and she never says much in letters.”

  “Doesn't Jane write to you?”

  “I've had one letter from her – last Christmas.”

  “Oh.”

  “How is she, Bruce?”

  He smiled. “She's rugged. But I don't know, really. I've hardly been home myself. When I heard about John I thought it would make a lot of difference to Jane. Hasn't it?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I've begged her again and again to come down for a holiday. It's no use.”

  “Well,” he said, “Jane may stay the same but Grenville's changing. There's a new Airforce camp being built four miles out. Beyond your Uncle Matt's place.” Some of the lightness left his voice. “I don't know how you've felt down here, but it's been an awful year in Canada. Everybody's worried sick about the war and feeling guilty because there's so little they can do.”

  “It came just as you prophesied, didn't it?”

  “The war?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I used to think I was pretty clever, didn't I? It's a lot different from what I expected it would be.”

  A key scraped in the lock of the outer door and Lassiter entered the hall. Lucy rose and went out to him, they exchanged a few words, and then he came into the living room to welcome Bruce.

  “Swell seeing you.” They shook hands and he waved toward the room. “Don't let the stage set fool you. Lucy's the same girl she always was, only better. I've been trying for months to show her the town but she won't budge. You're a fine excuse for a party and we're going to have one – I hope.” His eye shot to the cocktails. “I need one of those. Mind if I have a quick one before I change?”

  Lucy's hand was in one of his. “Was it a bad day?”

  “Ashweiler's been in town since seven-thirty. That ought to answer your question.”

  He downed a cocktail and refilled his glass. Then he lit a cigarette and sat down, crossing his legs, big and solid in his chair. He puffed quickly and set his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray and then took a quieter sip of his drink.

  “Carl handed Ashweiler over to Stan Pratt for the night,” he said to Lucy. “That means the Diamond Horseshoe, wouldn't you think?” He covered his mouth to hide a yawn. “A year ago Stan was just another Yale boy coming to town with an idea! Tonight he's arrived – he's got Ashweiler.”

  Lucy went out to the kitchen and Lassiter grinned as he saw Bruce's eyes follow her.

  “She looks wonderful,” Bruce said.

  “Doesn't she? Ashweiler used to be my boss,” Lassiter went on. “I was reporting to him when I did that job in Grenville. Now I handle his company's account in the agency. It's a hell of an account – the only thing good about it is the advertising appropriations it carries. Everybody uses plumbing in America. What I'm really after is Harper Aircraft. The public doesn't know a damn thing about planes, it only thinks it does. I want a chance to do the telling. As a matter of fact, an aircraft account would be a national service at a time like this. Do you see any Harpers up in Canada?”

  “A friend of mine crashed one in Lake Saint-Louis last week.”

  “Then it's a fact they're bad at the take-off?”

  “They have that reputation.”

  “Did your friend get out in time?”

  Bruce shook his head.


  “Sorry.” Lassiter looked at the amber liquid in his glass. “Myron Harper's a genius, but he slipped up on that model. Wait till you see their new stuff. I've looked at the models and they're just going into production. He's calling it the Privateer – the best medium bomber yet.”

  “We could use them.”

  Bruce tried without success to keep a spark of resentment out of his voice, for lately the papers had been full of stories about American planes coming up to Canada in quantity and the public believed they were true.

  Lassiter glanced enviously at the wing on Bruce's chest and shot quick and informed questions about training methods in the R.A.F. What kind of training aircraft were they using in Canada or was it a secret? The current American theory about fighter planes, a special plane for four different levels of altitude, was absolutely no good in practice. He had it on authority that the army had always been against it, but of course it looked good on paper and made a fine story in public-relations handouts. There was going to be an awful payoff if they ever tried to use that kind of an idea in combat. The trouble down here was that Americans knew they could knock hell out of Hitler if once they started and that was the very thing which made them put off starting. He wished he'd finished his course at M.I.T. He had always wanted to work with planes and now an aircraft engineer could name his own terms anywhere. What kind of a plane was Bruce flying himself? Bruce told him, adding that he had seen only one Hurricane and had yet to see a Spitfire.

  “And probably no real bombers at all?” Lassiter said. “But it's going to be a bombers’ war, from what I hear. You know what I did yesterday? I paid a visit to your consulate to ask questions about enlistment in the R.C.A.F.”

  Lucy had returned to the room; she was at Lassiter's back and Bruce realized that he didn't know she was there. Her face had frozen at her husband's words.

  “When he found out I was thirty-five plus he shook his head and thanked me. Of course I probably couldn't have got away from the job anyway, but a man gets restless. A hell of a thing to be told, that you're too old for the Air Corps.” Lucy moved across the room and he said, “I'm not old, am I, Lucy?”

  She told him he was the same as always, and he drained his glass and put his arm about her waist. They smiled at each other and his hand slipped caressingly over the curve of her hips. Bruce felt himself excluded completely and finally. He had never seen a woman regard a man as Lucy did Lassiter at that moment. It was not the look of a woman who loves a man blindly, but of one who has come to love him as much for his weaknesses as for his strength, who has found something precious in him that nobody else knows. With a touch of malice, Bruce told himself that Lassiter seemed to others a good deal older than he seemed to himself. There were streaks of grey in his tawny hair, he had grown heavier, and lines were about his eyes. Bruce was measuring him against the men he had left behind in the squadron, and he knew this was unfair, for they were in training and there was the unnamable quality of dedication about them all. It was too easy for a soldier, and especially for an airman, to take advantage of his status. Bruce decided that although he didn't like Lassiter he wished he were able to like him better, for the man was sincerely fond of Lucy. In those stupid, naive days before the war, when Bruce himself had felt mildly sorry for her, it had been Steve Lassiter who had recognized what she really was.

  Lassiter was looking at his watch. “It's about right, now,” he said. “Come on.” He nodded to Bruce with a quick grin. “Come and see what Lucy's done since you saw her last.”

  Bruce followed them into a room in the rear of the apartment. The maid had just deposited a fat baby behind the bars of a white-painted crib. He looked at his father and mother and then at the face of the stranger. When he looked back at his father he laughed. Lucy and Stephen began to talk to him as parents do to an infant too young to talk back, and Bruce fumbled without much success for words of his own. He had never known what to say when confronted with a baby as young as this one, but he admitted aloud that the child had charm.

  AFTER Stephen had changed, they left the apartment, took a taxi down Madison, turned east into a street in the Fifties, and got out at a restaurant which called itself the Jardin de Cluny. Inside, Bruce looked around and wondered where the flowers were kept. It was a long narrow room with leather seats running the length of the walls and a small bar in front. The ceiling was only six inches above the crown of his head. The air was blue and the back part of the room was so dimly lit one received an impression of many people eating in a smoky cave. Over the bar the lights shone on the glistening forehead of a barman who looked like Napoleon and on the diffuse faces of hungry people drinking cocktails while they waited to eat. All the stools at the bar were occupied and half a dozen men and women were standing behind the stools with glasses in their hands. More drinkers sat at small tables set near the wall opposite the bar. A French woman with skin like a dried larigan, wearing heavy keys at her waist, watched over the entrance to the inner room.

  A tall girl detached herself from the crowd at the bar. She had long black hair like a cavalier's mane reaching to her shoulders, a dominant nose, full lips, and large black eyes. She came away from the bar with a langorous movement, but when she spoke her voice throbbed with vitality.

  “Why did you pick this place?” she said to Lassiter. “Don't you see enough of it every day at noon?”

  “Best food in New York,” Lassiter said. “Best drinks, too.”

  “The best what?” She slipped an arm around Lucy's waist and her voice was warm. “Hello, darling, you look lovely. Steve didn't give me a chance to suggest some place else. He left the message when I was out. Is this Bruce?”

  Lucy laid a hand on Bruce's forearm. “Stephen's sister, Marcia Stapleton.”

  “Hello!” Marcia said with a rising inflection. She looked him frankly in the eyes. “Isn't Lucy a darling?”

  In some bewilderment Bruce murmured agreement.

  “Let's have a drink,” Marcia said. “What have you been drinking, rye?”

  She went to a corner of the bar where she leaned past a man with hooded eyes and ordered four rye sours. As she stepped back, the man stared at her as if she were something on sale in a store.

  “Damn it,” her brother said in irritation, “why can't you let me do the ordering?”

  “You can pay for them, darling.”

  Marcia turned back to Bruce, but at that moment a group of four left one of the tables and Lassiter, followed by Lucy and Bruce, took their places.

  “This place isn't corrupt, you know,” Marcia said to Bruce as she joined them. “It's merely unpleasant.” The man with the hooded eyes was still staring at her, and Marcia, meeting his stare, continued without dropping her voice by so much as a decibel. “This is a place where you meet people who are trying to turn themselves into a hick's idea of what a New Yorker is like. Corrupt places have a savour of their own, but this bistro is merely corrupting. There's a difference, don't you think?”

  “I'm afraid I don't see it.”

  “But in this case there really is a difference,” Marcia insisted, apparently forgetting the man with the hooded eyes. “This is where Steve and his friends from that lovely business of his meet over lunch with their clients in order to corrupt America. The tables are always full when they arrive, so there's nothing to do but wait and drink, and by the time they get something to eat their clients are half drunk, particularly if they come from out of town and like having smart New Yorkers treat them like kings. That's when Carl does his business with them. He never drinks at lunch himself. He tells them he has ulcers which of course he hasn't at all, and they believe it because it's part of their picture that all ad-men should have them. Carl is so clever! Steve and I had a grandfather who always did his business after lunch, but he was very religious and believed God was on his side whenever he put something over on a drunk. He owned a woollen mill.”

  “Marcia,” Lassiter said, “Bruce is down here on leave and up till now he's been having a good
time.” He got up from the table, inserted his shoulders between a pair of drinkers at the bar, and spoke to the Napoleonic bartender. “Did Mr. Bratian say he'd be late, Jean?”

  The barman, with both hands on a shaker, paused just long enough to say no.

  “I don't think Carl had to see anyone tonight.” Lassiter's voice sounded worried as he came back to the bar. “He may have forgotten, though.”

  “When did he ever forget anything?” Marcia said.

  The barman was holding up a tray with four drinks so that they were visible over the heads of the people at the bar. Lassiter rose again, and Bruce watched in fascination while he manipulated the tray. He withdrew it between the left elbow of a tall man and the right breast of a short woman, handed one glass to Lucy and another to Marcia, and set the tray on the table. Bruce took his glass and turned toward Lucy, but her eyes were on her husband. Lassiter was flushed and tense, though his big body was immobile as he sat with the drink in his hand. Then Bruce realized that Marcia was talking to him and turned to listen to her.

  Suddenly everyone in the room seemed to be in disguise, Marcia especially. Her voice and manner reminded him of somebody he had seen and he guessed it must have been a movie actress, though which one he couldn't remember. And yet he was sure she was not innately theatrical. She was like a person doing what had always been expected of her without exactly knowing why. She had a superb figure, her dinner dress was black velvet, and it made the most of her. She wore platinum jewellery and a white ermine jacket. Now she slipped the jacket off and held it out to Bruce.

  “Take it from me, will you, like an angel? It's so hot in this place.”

  Bruce took the jacket and put it on the bench beside him. When he turned back to the table, Marcia was looking at the men standing at the bar. Her lips were parted and she seemed childlike and rather forlorn. Bruce sipped his drink and his mind began to race. He was exhilarated by the rapidity with which it moved today; normally he was slow to estimate people, but today he was surprising himself. His eyes met Lucy's across the the table and he felt a warm glow from their mutual consciousness of one another, from their surprised pleasure at finding each other changed and yet permanently themselves. He turned to Marcia again, and as her gaze came back he decided she was probably more sensual than passionate; he was not very sure what the distinction meant, but he was pleased to be able to make it. Then Lassiter's chin rose, and turning to follow his eyes, Bruce saw a little man with sallow cheeks and a big nose coming in the door. A moment later he was introduced to Carl Bratian, and in the quick flash of those gypsy eyes he felt an appraisal of himself far more thorough than his own appraisal of Marcia. Bratian was wearing a dinner jacket under a closely fitting topcoat and he carried suede gloves in his left hand.