“Your parties haven't fallen off in colour since I've been away,” she said. She was pleased at the cool sound of her own voice. “I'm glad I came. And now I'm going, thank you.”
Bratian looked at her closely. “Not yet,” he said. “You're the most attractive woman in the room and I want you to meet some more of my guests.”
He was looking over her shoulder and she knew that Stephen had seen her and was coming toward them. Carl was still talking to her but she had no idea what he was saying. Then she heard Stephen's voice. “Hullo, Lucy! I thought you'd turned Carl down on this party!”
She turned around. “I changed my mind.” She was smiling with bright animation. “I had to get some things for the children that I couldn't find in Princeton. I called the office and they told me you were already here so I came along for half an hour before the next train.”
The girl had followed Stephen across the room and now she was at his elbow. Without turning around he knew she was there.
“Lucy,” he said. “I don't think you know Gail Beaumont?”
Gail extended her hand, and Lucy taking it learned that it was short-fingered, well-kept, and capable.
“I've heard a great deal about you from Carl.” The girl's voice was warm, as Lucy had known it would be. “He's one of your great admirers.”
Lucy smiled.
“It's a rare compliment, you know.” She had a natural and very attractive laugh. “He thinks all the rest of us are phonies.”
“As you are,” Bratian said.
“There are lots of people here you know,” Stephen said to Lucy. “Come along and talk to them.”
“I've been talking to all sorts of them. Right now I'm talking to Carl.” She turned to Gail Beaumont and smiled again. “I've been away from New York so long I'm finding this fun for a change.”
Stephen was restless and Carl was watchful but the girl was completely at ease.
“Your husband has just been telling me about some of the things advertising could do if it ever grew up,” she said. “And I've been telling him the same about radio. Such wishful-thinking for a Thursday afternoon in Beekman Place.”
Stephen cut in, “You remember Leo Emerson, don't you, Lucy? I had lunch with him today. He's left owi and he's going in with Jack Mansfield. As they say in the trade, when Leo builds something by himself it's the biggest thing since the Crucifixion, but when Leo and Jack get together you'll have to go back to the Immaculate Conception to beat them.”
Lucy wished he would stop, for his own sake. She saw the familiar sardonic expression begin to form about Bratian's lips and then Stephen suddenly stopped talking as two men joined them. They were friends of Gail's, they were introduced, and conversation became general, with Gail the centre of attention. She talked well, with a light touch Lucy envied, mainly about her work and the people she knew. She called Norman Corwin and Orson Welles by their first names and Archibald MacLeish and E.B. White by their nicknames.
As Lucy listened to her, feeling tongue-tied and incompetent, she saw Gail Beaumont as a sort of end-product of all the battles for improvement in the lot of the female sex which had been waged over the past half-century. A generation ago a woman with her mind and lack of conventional beauty would have resigned herself to a career. But Gail had been brought up to believe she could have her cake and eat it too. She was too young to be a member of the well-meaning generation; here was none of the gay desperation which made Marcia so vulnerable. Gail had always known precisely what she was doing. She knew that in an age like her own, her morality would be judged by the kind of opinions she held. She knew how unsure most men had become, and as a concomitant, that vitality and confidence were worth more in a woman than any degree of beauty. Gail was one of a new species, a woman who took it for granted that she was as much superior to the average female in bed as she was better than the average male across a desk.
But even as her mind drew these generalizations, Lucy knew that it made little difference to her what Gail Beaumont was like in reality. The only thing that counted was what she seemed to be to Stephen, and his beliefs depended on his state of mind.
She heard Bratian say, “Why don't you stay in town for the night, Lucy?”
“I'd love to, but I promised the children I'd be back by nine.”
“What's more, you also promised Shirley. But you can phone her. Tell her to stay all night. We can have dinner as soon as this mob clears out. For that matter, we can go away and leave them.”
“Thanks just the same, Carl, but I can't manage it this time. Are you coming home tonight, Stephen, or staying in town?”
“Damn it, I've got to work tonight.”
Did she only imagine that a smile touched Gail's mouth? She said goodbye to Carl and thanked him, smiled once again at Gail and the men who were standing just behind her, and passed through the room, knowing that Stephen was following her. The elevator opened into a private foyer and while they waited for it Stephen put his arm about her waist.
“You're looking swell. You ought to come into town more often. If you'd told me you were coming in today I'd have made arrangements for you to stay the night.”
“What difference would it make if you have to work?”
“It's a hell of a life we lead, isn't it?” He dropped his arm as he heard the sign of the rising elevator. “How are the kids?”
“They're fine.”
The elevator stopped, the door opened, and he followed her into it. As it began to descend he handed her a copy of The Reader's Digest which he had been carrying in his pocket.
“You might like to read this on the train. It's got the article on Myron Harper – the one you helped me with.” A frown rutted his forehead. “Things are jamming at the office. We're working harder than ever but everyone of us knows that the minute the war ends the Harper account will go with it. Of course, the Privateer has definitely shortened the war, and if it hadn't been put inside the public imagination – well, the harder you work the surer you are of putting yourself out of a job.”
They stepped onto the marble floor of the entrance hall surrounded by wallpaper that represented a hunting scene on the banks of the Hudson a century ago.
“I liked the girl you introduced me to,” Lucy said, not looking at him. “What was her name – Gail Beaumont?”
“She's all right, isn't she? Only twenty-four and she's had several original shows on the air already. She worked up the continuity and sound effects on the program we did for Harper last fall, too.”
The air in Beekman Place was warm and fresh. A taxi rolled up to the canopy and stopped in answer to Stephen's signal, he kissed Lucy as he held the door open for her, she stepped in, and he told the driver to go to Penn Station. Lucy waved to him as the car drove off, then leaned back in the shadows of the tonneau and closed her eyes.
How had it come about that she was part of a situation so stale, so ridden with clichés? A set routine had been outlined for it long ago. All four of them – Carl, Stephen, Gail, and herself – had played their parts automatically. They had been so civilized, so modern. They had said or done nothing to break the smooth acceptance of a primal injustice so vast no woman since the beginning of time had ever been able to remove it. A man could act as Stephen was acting now and be fairly sure of losing nothing so long as he stayed within the accepted pattern. If his wife wished to retaliate she would lose everything she had left merely by trying.
The taxi worked its way across town in the early evening traffic. When it came to a stop behind a line of cars held up by a red light on Fifth Avenue Lucy leaned forward and asked the driver to let her out. The man clicked off his meter, she got out, leaving The Readers Digest on the seat, fumbled in her bag, paid him, and walked away.
Now she was alone in New York; for almost the first time since leaving Grenville she felt she was alone in a foreign city in a strange land. She crossed the street and drifted northward. Couples were moving on the avenue, so glad to be alive and together their gladness filled t
he air. There were more single men and women on the street than couples, but she saw only those who were together. She turned into the mall at Rockefeller Center and saw that the blue hyacinths and yellow forsythia were back for another spring. She walked through the mall, skirted the sunken pond and went into the R.C.A. Building, down the stairs to the telephones, and there she called home to tell Shirley she would be back on a later train. Shirley didn't want to stay.
“Please do it this time,” Lucy said. “I'll pay you overtime and you can have Saturday off this week.”
Shirley agreed to stay.
Back in the street again Lucy began to wander with the air cool on her cheeks, hardly knowing where she was or what she was doing, knowing only that she was unfit to go home and talk to John and Sally as she always did before they went to sleep.
She found herself in a line that was forming up for the Music Hall and she stood passively while people continued the line behind her. Images shot through her mind like bursting lights. Stephen's voice was in her ears repeating to Gail the same words he had so often used to her. With diabolical clarity she saw the expression that would appear on his face as he made love to the girl, and for a moment her imagination became so violent it made her whole body quiver as it built up a montage of scenes, natural as health were she a part of them, obscene and terrible and unjust when they were of Stephen and Gail.
She slipped out of the line and walked rapidly around the whole of Radio City until she was back again in the plaza. Again the eternal couples were moving in the spring evening, but now their happiness was intolerable. She crossed Fiftieth Street and made her way to the Embassy Theater where she sat for half an hour watching newsreels. She saw a Japanese soldier leaping like a human torch from a gun pit with flames ripping the flesh off his naked shoulders and she saw the helmet and back of the Australian soldier who continued to spray him with burning oil. She saw Russians fighting over the rubble of a German town, the peasant faces and wide buttocks, falling and shooting, rising and shambling forward, and then all of them blotted out by a mortar burst which blasted rock and earth into the camera's lens. She took her eyes away from the screen and looked at the people sitting around her. Practically all of them were men. And why not? Why shouldn't men come to see the logical result of their activities? A group of Polish women replaced the Russians on the screen and the camera panned their faces: faces worn by age-old primitive work were here torn with agony as they fulfilled the function appropriate to them, for their slaughtered children lay in shapeless bundles at their feet. Even for this kind of tragedy there was a prescribed routine. Civilization had reached the point where its own death agony could be used as entertainment in a theatre.
She got up and left the movie house, and when she came out into the air it was almost dark. She looked up and tried to see the sky but found only a reflection of neon lights overhead. She was back in the place from which she had tried to escape, back in Rockefeller Center with its eternal couples and the solitary ones, while from high in the tower above the hyacinths and forsythia, Thursday night radio programs were leaping into space to make the nation laugh. A solitary man passed. Two soldiers walking together. A soldier and a girl. Then with a warm feeling of irrational pleasure she saw an airman with a Canada shoulder-flash looking into the window of a bookshop in the mall. She went to stand beside him, looked into the window herself, then turned and smiled.
“I'm a Canadian too,” she said. “I hope you like New York.”
He turned, another of the uniformed children. “It's wonderful, ma'am. People are certainly swell to us down here.”
“Are you a long way from home?”
“All the way from Alberta. You wouldn't know the town. It's a pretty small one.”
“I'm from a small town, too. Grenville, in Ontario.”
He grinned at her. “Well, I certainly know Grenville. I trained at the R.C.A.F. camp near there.”
She said something else to him and then she was suddenly alone again. Had she sent the boy away? Or had he thought she looked too old to be interesting, said something polite the way the young do to older people, and slipped off? She realized now that she was homesick, homesick with a deep inner pain. She had often missed Grenville but she had never felt like this before. She wondered how Jane was tonight. It was Thursday and Jane would be alone in the old house. It would be cold up there, colder than here. Rotted ice would still lie in the ponds and the earth and trees would be bare and stark, the sun warm in the afternoons, while in the nights the cold air would suck down from the tundra and stiffen the softened earth in farms and gardens.
Could she ever go home again? To go back to Grenville would be a return to nothing. What had she ever done in Grenville but grow a garden? She had made nothing good of her life in Grenville and her life down here was over. So she had failed. But had she? For a while at least she had lived. Had any woman failed if she had two happy children? To love them, to tell them the truth as one knew it, to keep them till they wanted to leave – and then to sit back, to withdraw from their lives, to let them make their own mistakes while one grew old knowing one's importance was over. And then to watch the same process repeated again by them, each adding something to the sum their parents had accumulated, the town where they lived slowly growing into a wider graciousness, the generations dependent on one another as the seasons of the year are dependent. Without such a surety where was a woman's value or dignity?
She watched the water streaming in a repeated series of silver curves from the mouths of the dolphins among the hyacinths. She looked back and up to the R.C.A. Building, clean and cold as a sword. What century did she think she was living in? No wonder Stephen had gone to Gail! His wife was an anachronism. Why try to hold a family together when the best brains in the world were working night and day to rip families apart?
Water continued to stream from the dolphins, as cold as the silver bracelets on her arms that Marcia had given her last Christmas. What had Marcia been talking about the last time they met? A Christmas party at a school where Marcia had gone with one of her friends. Marcia had used all her talent for mimicry as she recounted a dialogue she had overheard between two children during the reception in the school gymnasium.
“But you called him your daddy!”
“I know, but he's not my real daddy. My real daddy's over there with Betty's mother, but he's not Betty's real daddy even if he is Betty's mother's husband. He's just her new daddy.”
Lucy turned and began to walk rapidly out of the mall onto Fifth Avenue. Oh, no, she whispered, not that! John and Sally must never be allowed to think such a thing as that. She stood at the curb and hailed a cab, and this time remained in it until she reached Pennsylvania Station. She walked through the concourse and found a seat in a coach just before the Philadelphia train pulled out.
Her mind was cooler now, it was back at the old female job of sorting out the gains and the losses. If she made an issue with Stephen over the Beaumont girl, what would be the good of it? If she let him see that she knew, she would hurt his pride, would make him feel less confident than ever, and Gail would immediately become all the more necessary to him. It was his pride, she told herself again and again. His male pride, exasperated by the continued frustration caused by the war and his business. If it hadn't been Gail it would doubtless have been someone else. He was forty, and in the accepted pattern he felt his youth slipping away. Perhaps all he wanted was a fling, a woman who could take him lightly for a time and give him a new sense of himself as a man.
She would be a crowning fool, Lucy decided, to let him see that she knew about this affair. One of the things he already resented in her was the fact that he felt she knew more about him than he knew himself. No, she told herself! No! A woman was a fool if she assumed that her marriage was wrecked the first time she discovered that her husband had committed adultery.
And yet Lucy knew as surely as she breathed that it would be impossible for her to live long in a state of suspense and dishonesty.
The train moved out of the tunnel into the factory wasteland, a million lights twinkled like stars in a sky turned upside down. A strange and unnatural lightness replaced the desperation Lucy had felt when she was alone in the city. At Newark the coach began to fill and the other half of her seat was taken by a soldier whose medal-ribbons proclaimed him a veteran from Europe. She had no wish to talk to him when he asked her a casual question, but he was too eager to share his excitement with someone to notice her withdrawal. He told her he had just returned to the United States that day on leave and was on his way home.
The train crashed through a station without stopping and a queer look crossed the soldier's face.
“Metuchen!” he muttered. “Were you ever in that town?”
“Never, I'm afraid.”
“Isn't it a funny thing? You go over this line may be three hundred times but you never know what kind of a place Metuchen is.” He laughed. “Did you ever hear of a place called Saarlautern in Germany? ”
“I think so. I'm not sure.”
“Well I was there about a month ago for a couple of hours – we were working the streets, see? I got cut off and I sure thought I was going to stay in that Kraut town for keeps. Do you know what I kept telling myself all the time? I kept telling myself that if I ever got home alive the first thing I was going to do was to go and see what Metuchen looked like. Can you beat it?”
“Do you still want to see it?”
“No. It don't mean a thing any more.”
The train banged across a set of points and rushed into thick darkness. It was bright as they went through New Brunswick and then it was dark again, and the soldier kept on talking and Lucy scarcely listened. As they neared Princeton Junction he got up and stretched his arms to the duffle bag he had put on the rack overhead.
Lucy looked up. “Getting off here?”
“Yes, ma'am, this is home.” He swung his bag to the floor of the aisle and leaned against the seat. “And my folks don't even know I'm back in the country. I got a lucky break and came over in a B-24. This time yesterday I was in England.”
The Precipice Page 35