Lucy Crown (22 page)

Oliver made an impatient gesture. “I read it. I read it,” he said. “It’s absurd. You obviously were in a state of nerves when you wrote it and …”

“Oliver,” Lucy said warningly.

“Anyway,” Oliver said, “it’s only for a few days. He’ll be going to school by the end of the month and then you’ll get a chance to calm down. You won’t see him again until Thanksgiving and …”

“I’m not going to see him for a few days,” Lucy said. “And I’m not going to see him at Thanksgiving. And I’m not going to see him at Christmas. And I’m not …”

“Lucy, stop that damned chant,” Oliver said harshly. “And don’t be a fool …”

Lucy closed her eyes wearily and waved her hand gently, dismissingly. “Why don’t you go home, the both of you,” she said, “and leave me alone?”

“I thought we settled that,” Oliver said.

“We haven’t settled anything. You said you wanted me back, and I said I wanted to come back. On certain conditions. One of the conditions is that I don’t have anything more to do with Tony.”

“For how long?” Oliver asked hoarsely.

“Forever.”

“That’s melodrama,” Oliver said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Now listen carefully,” Lucy said, standing directly in front of Oliver, controlling her voice with effort. “I mean every word I’ve said and every word I’m going to say. He hates me. He’s my enemy …”

“A thirteen-year-old boy …”

“He’s the witness against me,” Lucy said, “and he’ll never forget it, and neither will I. Every time he looks at me, he’s looking through that window that rainy afternoon. He looks at me and he’s judging me, prosecuting me, condemning me …”

“Don’t be hysterical, Lucy.” Oliver caught her hands, soothingly. “He’ll forget.”

“He won’t forget. Ask him. Ask him yourself. I can’t live in the same house with my judge like that! I can’t be made to feel guilty twenty times a day!” Her voice was shaken now and she was close to sobbing.

“You must try,” Oliver said.

“I have tried,” Lucy whispered. “I did everything I could to heal us. Even when I wrote you that I couldn’t come back with him, I still hoped … I didn’t really believe it, even while I was writing it. Then, this afternoon, he did this …” She pulled her hands away and pointed to the broken phonograph. “With a baseball bat. But it wasn’t a machine he was destroying. It was me. He was murdering
me!”
She was shouting crazily now. “Murder!”

Oliver seized her and shook her, sharply. “Stop that! Control yourself!”

Sobbing, not trying to free herself, she said, “He’ll poison everything. What’ll we turn out to be after five years like that? What sort of man will he be at the end of it?”

Oliver dropped his hands. They stood next to each other for a moment, without moving. Then Oliver shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said.

Lucy took in her breath in a long sigh. She bent her head and absently put her hands across her breast to her shoulders, stroking the spots where Oliver’s hand had gripped her. When she spoke her voice was flat. “Then leave me alone. Take him away with you and leave me alone. For good.”

“I can’t do that, either,” Oliver said.

In the same flat and toneless voice, still touching her shoulders gently, Lucy said, “You’ll have to do one or the other, Oliver.”

Oliver turned and went over to the edge of the porch, his back to Lucy. He leaned against a pillar, staring out across the quiet lake. And I was sure I had it all figured out, he thought. He felt defeated and incapable of further plans or decisions. What I should have done, he thought, with bitter hindsight, was pack everybody up the night I was here and get us all home together. Now, everybody’s had time to dig in.

He heard a movement behind him and he turned quickly. Lucy was opening the door of the cottage, on her way in.

“Where’re you going?” he asked suspiciously.

“Tony’s coming.” She pointed toward the hotel, and Oliver saw Tony walking swiftly toward the cottage. “I think it’d be a good idea if you talked to him.”

She went inside, the screen door tapping lightly behind her. Oliver watched her shadowy figure disappear through the rusted mesh.

He shook his head and made himself smile before he turned to face Tony. He walked out onto the lawn a little way to greet him. Tony approached warily, his face grave and watchful, and stopped before he reached his father.

“Hello, Daddy,” he said, waiting.

Oliver went over to him and put his hand around Tony’s shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Hello, Tony,” he said. Still with his arm across the boy’s shoulders, Oliver walked back to the porch.

“I’m all ready to go,” Tony said, pointing to the bags on the porch. “Should I start carrying things to the car?”

Oliver didn’t answer. He dropped his arm from Tony’s shoulders and walked slowly over to a rattan armchair. He sat down heavily, like an old man, staring at his son.

“I thought we were supposed to get out of here by three o’clock,” Tony said.

“Come over here, Tony.”

Doubtfully, as though fearing punishment, Tony walked across the porch and stopped in front of the chair. “Are you sore at me, Daddy?” he asked in a low voice.

“No. Of course not. Why should I be?”

“For calling you that night,” Tony said, looking at the floor. “For telling you what … what I saw …”

Oliver sighed. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I had to tell you, didn’t I?” Tony was pleading now.

“Yes,” Oliver said, after a pause. He stared at his son, wondering how much of this day the boy was going to remember. Children forget everything, Patterson had said. He had also said, Grownups forget everything. But none of it was true. Tony was going to remember clearly, accurately, painfully, and his life was going to be built on the memory. It would be simpler and less painful to slide past this moment, to make an excuse for taking the boy home alone, for packing him off to school alone. It would be easier to put him off temporarily if he asked about Lucy, to be vague and tricky when he wrote from school about coming home for the holidays, to let him discover slowly, by himself, over a period of time, that he had been put outside the boundaries of the family. It would be simpler, less painful, and finally, and with justice, as a grown man, Tony would despise him for it.

Oliver reached out and drew the boy to him, putting him on his lap, holding his head against his shoulder, as he had done long ago, when Tony had been small.

“Tony,” Oliver said, and it was easier to talk this way, with the boy’s weight against him, and the bony feel of his legs, and his head averted, “listen carefully. I wish this hadn’t happened. I wish, if it had happened, you never knew about it. But it happened. You found out about it. And you had to tell me.”

Tony said nothing. He sat tensely, imprisoned in his father’s arms.

“Tony,” Oliver said, “I’d like to ask you a question. Do you hate your mother?”

Oliver felt the boy stiffen in his arms. “Why?” Tony asked. “What did she say?”

“Answer the question, Tony.”

With a sudden movement, Tony wriggled out of his father’s arms, and stood in front of him, his hands clenching and unclenching. “Yes,” he said savagely. “I hate her.”

“Tony …” Oliver started painfully.

“I’m not going to talk to her,” Tony said, speaking rapidly, his voice high and sharp and childish. “She can say anything she wants. Maybe I’ll say yes or no once in a while, when I have to, but I’m not going to talk to her.”

“How would you feel if you never saw her again?” Oliver said.

“Good!” He stood there, shoulders hunched, chin out fiercely, like a boy challenging another boy to cross a line drawn in the dust before him.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Oliver said gently. “She loves you very much.”

“I don’t care what she says.”

“But she’s afraid of you …”

“Don’t believe her. Don’t believe anything she says.” Now he didn’t sound like a little boy at all.

“And because she’s afraid of you,” Oliver went on, conscientiously, but without hope, going to the end of every argument, “she says she doesn’t want to take you home with us. She doesn’t want to live in the same place with you, she says.”

For a moment, Oliver thought that Tony was going to cry. He ducked his head and he rubbed his hands jerkily against his thighs. But then he raised his head and looked squarely at Oliver. “That’s okay with me,” he said. “I’m going to school anyway.”

“Not only school,” Oliver said, persisting. “She never wants to see you, she says. She doesn’t even want to let you come into the house. Not on Christmas. Not on holidays. Never.”

“Oh.” Tony’s voice was so soft that Oliver wasn’t sure he had said anything. “What if you said, ‘It’s my house, I’ll take in anybody I want.’”

“Then she’ll leave me,” said Oliver flatly. “This afternoon.”

“Oh.” Tony glanced, measuringly, at his father. “Don’t you want her to?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why not?”

Oliver sighed and when he spoke, he didn’t look at Tony, but above his head, at the blue sky, cold with its premonition of autumn. “It’s hard to explain to a thirteen-year-old boy what a …a marriage is like, Tony. How a man and a woman become—locked—with each other. I miscalculated on myself. Do you know what that means?”

Tony thought for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes. You thought you were a certain way and you turned out to be another way.”

“A certain way.” Oliver nodded. “It turns out that I was wrong.”

“All right,” Tony said harshly. “What do you want me to do?”

“I’m going to leave it up to you, Tony. If you say the word, I’ll call your mother out here and tell her you’re staying with me. And we’ll say good-bye to her and that’ll be the end of it.”

Tony’s mouth quivered. “And how’ll you feel then?”

“I … I’ll feel like dying, Tony,” Oliver said.

“And if I say I’ll go away?”

“I’ll take you home and start you in school and I’ll come back for your mother,” Oliver said, still looking over Tony’s head at the cold sky. “I’ll visit you on holidays and maybe in the summertime we could go on trips together. To the Rockies, to Canada, maybe even to Europe.”

“But I never could come home?” Tony asked, like a man at a ticket window in a railroad station asking all possible questions, to make sure there would be no mistake about the train he was to take.

“No,” Oliver whispered. “Not for a long time.”

“Never?” Tony asked harshly.

“Well, in a year or two …” Oliver said. “Right now your mother’s rather hysterical, but in time, I’m sure …”

“Okay!” Tony turned away, presenting his back to Oliver. “What do I care?”

“What do you mean, Tony?” Oliver stood up and walked over behind Tony, but didn’t touch him.

“Call her out here. Tell her you’ll come back for her.”

“Are you sure?”

Tony wheeled around and stared bitterly at his father. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“It’s up to you, Tony.”

Tony shouted now, out of control. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes, Tony,” Oliver whispered. “That’s what I want.”

“Okay,” Tony said recklessly. “What’re we waiting for?” He ran over to the door and threw it open and shouted in. “Mummy! Mummy!” Then he turned back to his father. “You talk to her.” Moving very quickly, his hands fumbling, he started to pick up his valises. “I want to put these old things in the car!”

“Wait.” Oliver put out his hand to restrain him. “You’ve got to say good-bye. You can’t just go off. Maybe, at the last minute, she’ll change her mind …”

“I don’t want anyone to change their mind,” Tony shouted. “Where’s my telescope?”

The door opened and Lucy came out. She looked pale, but composed, her eyes going from Oliver to Tony and back again.

“Oliver …” she said.

“I’m taking Tony with me now.” He tried to sound routine and matter-of-fact. “I’ll call you. I’ll be back for you some time next week.”

Lucy nodded, her eyes on Tony.

“We might as well get started now,” Oliver said, with shaky briskness. “It’s pretty late as it is. Tony, are these all your things?” He pointed at the two valises.

“Yes,” Tony said. He avoided looking at his mother, and gathered up the bat, the telescope, the fishing rod. “I’ll carry these.”

Oliver picked up the two valises. “I’ll wait for you in the car.” His voice was choked and muffled. He tried to say something to Lucy, but nothing seemed to come out. He walked off hurriedly, carrying the bags.

Tony stared after him for a moment, then, still avoiding looking at his mother, peered around him, as though making sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind him.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I got everything.”

Lucy went over to him. There were tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye?” she asked softly.

Tony fought with the movements of his mouth. “Sure,” he said gruffly. “Good-bye.”

“Tony,” Lucy said, standing close to him, but not touching him, “I want you to grow up into a wonderful man.”

With a childish cry of anguish, Tony dropped the things he was carrying and threw himself into Lucy’s arms. They held each other tight for a long time, but they both knew they were only saying good-bye and that it wasn’t going to do any good. Finally, Lucy stepped back, resolutely.

“I think it’s time to go,” she said.

Tony’s face stiffened. “Yes,” he said. He bent and picked up the bat and the telescope and the fishing rod and started after Oliver. He stopped at the corner of the porch, and Lucy felt that for the rest of her life that was the way she was going to remember him, in the suit that had grown too small for him during the summer, stiff-faced, holding the implements of childhood, outlined against the ruffled blue lake. “If we happen to just see each other,” he said, “you know, just by accident, like people do, on a train or in the street, I mean—what do we say to each other?”

Lucy smiled shakily at him. “I … I guess we say hello,” she said.

Tony nodded. “Hello,” he said thoughtfully. He nodded again, as though satisfied, and disappeared around the corner of the porch, following his father.

Lucy stood still. After a while she heard the car start and drive off. She didn’t move. She just stood there, looking out at the lake, with the wreckage of the phonograph at her feet.