Lucy Crown (23 page)

And that was the summer.

15

“W
ELL, MR. CROWN,”
the headmaster was saying, “as in most cases of boys his age, there’s a little of everything to report.” The headmaster raised the bottle of sherry inquiringly, but Oliver shook his head. When Oliver had been in school he was sure that his headmaster had not offered sherry to the fathers of the pupils before lunch. Oliver realized that this was a sign that education had become more relaxed since he was a boy, but he also realized that if he accepted a second glass, a minute demerit would be entered, at the back of the headmaster’s mind, against the Crown family.

The headmaster put the bottle down ceremonially. His name was Hollis, he was surprisingly young, and he moved delicately in the cheerful library-like room which served as his office, as though to reassure the parents of the boys entrusted to his care that the developing souls would not be harmed by any sudden or uncalculated movement on his part.

“What I mean,” Hollis went on, smiling boyishly, expertly taking the sting out of judgment, “is that he has his problems, even as you and I did at his age, I’m sure.”

“When I was his age,” Oliver said, purposely frivolous, to keep from being lectured, “my one problem was that I could only chin forty-three times. I’d set my heart on fifty, by my sixteenth birthday.”

Hollis smiled dutifully, accustomed to many generations of fathers. “Of course,” he said, “the physical thing cannot be altogether discounted. Because he can’t join in all the games with the other boys, the team games—although I do hear he plays rather good tennis—it’s possible that his—uh—leaning toward solitude, toward going-it-alone, has been somewhat accentuated. Although the school doctor is quite satisfied with his physical condition—we give him very careful over-all examinations once a month, you know. In fact, the doctor has privately expressed the opinion to me that Tony, if he wished, could indulge in a great deal more group activity than he actually does.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like the group,” Oliver said. “Maybe if the group was different, he’d plunge in up to his neck.”

“Perhaps,” Hollis said. The tone was mollifying and polite, but there was a chilly blink of the eyelids over the candid, clever blue eyes. “Although we do have a fine group of boys here, if I say so myself. Most representative.”

“I’m sorry,” Oliver said, knowing that he had been too brusque to this harmless, conscientious man only because it was impossible to explain anything to him. “I’m sure it’s Tony’s fault.”

“Well”—Hollis spread his hands forgivingly—“fault is a harsh word. Taste, perhaps. No doubt he’ll change as he gets older. Though, as the twig is bent …” He shrugged and smiled at the same time, administering a warning and a caress at the same moment. “He does particularly well at one thing,” Hollis went on, happy to be able to uncover treasure. “He does the cleverest cartoons for the school paper. We haven’t had a boy as gifted as that in many years. They’re surprisingly mature. Rather acid, I must say …” Again the soft apologetic smile, to put the gloss of manners on the necessary and rather unpleasant truth. “I, myself, have heard some grumblings in certain quarters about the sharpness of some of his caricatures. But, of course, he must have sent them to you, you’ve seen them yourself …”

“No,” Oliver said. “I haven’t seen them. I didn’t know he did them.”

“Ah.” Hollis regarded Oliver curiously. “Really?” He bent his head and shuffled through some papers on his desk, then spoke more quickly, tactfully getting away from the subject. “He does fairly well in biology and chemistry. Which is all to the good, of course, since he means to take a pre-medical course. He’s—uh—negligent, I’m afraid, in most of the other subjects, although I’m told he does a great deal of reading on his own. Unfortunately,” again the understanding, practiced, headmaster’s grimace, “almost none of the reading has anything at all to do with his class work. And if he wants to get into a good college in two more years …” Hollis left the sentence hanging, mildly and ominously threatening, like the first delicate puff of wind on a still, dark day.

“I’ll talk to him,” Oliver said. He stood up. “Thank you very much.”

Hollis stood up, too, framed against the window, behind which, in the distance, the gray Gothic buildings of the campus glittered dully in the autumn sun. He held out his hand, a spry, intelligent young man in a soft blue shirt, knowingly representing solid, gray-stone tradition, discreetly tempered by progress. The two men shook hands and Hollis said, “I suppose you’ve come up to take Tony back to Hartford with you for the holiday?”

“We don’t live in Hartford,” Oliver said.

“Ah?” Hollis said. “I thought I remembered …”

“We moved almost a year ago,” Oliver said. “We live in New Jersey now. In Orange. I had a chance to sell my plant in Hartford and buy a larger and more up-to-date one in New Jersey,” he explained, giving all the false reasons.

“Do you like New Jersey better?” Hollis inquired politely.

“Much,” Oliver said. He did not explain that he would have liked any place in the world better than Hartford, any place to which he and Lucy came as strangers, any place in which they had no friends to ask curious questions about Tony and to fall into strained silence whenever the subject of children came up in conversation. He did not explain, either, that for the last six months of their stay in Hartford, Lucy had refused to see any of their old friends, with the exception of Sam Patterson. Sam Patterson knew most of what there was to be known, and there was no need to lie to him. With all the others, the weight of speculation had finally been too much to bear. “It’s no good any more,” Lucy had said. “After an evening with them, I feel as though I’ve been with a group of cryptographers who’ve been working with all their might to crack a code. And the code is me. I’ve had enough of it. If you want to see them, you go yourself. I’m through.”

“Well,” Hollis was saying, “Orange isn’t so far. Are you driving Tony home today?”

“No,” Oliver said. “This Thanksgiving my wife and I’re going down to South Carolina. It’s my one chance to play some golf before the winter sets in. I just came up to have lunch with Tony.”

“Oh.” A noncommittal blink of academic eyes. “I’ll arrange to have Tony in to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll tell Mrs. Hollis.”

“Thanks,” Oliver said. “Will there be many boys here?”

“A few,” Hollis said. “We have a boy whose parents are in India, and there are always one or two from—uh—broken families …” He ducked his head deprecatingly, smiling, deploring and forgiving the ways of the modern world. “Though most of the boys who live too far away, or who don’t go home for one reason or another, usually are invited by friends.” He paused, dutifully, permitting a parent to understand that his son was not the sort of boy who was invited by friends. “Don’t worry,” he said heartily. “Tony will be well fed.”

He escorted Oliver to the outside door, and stood there, in the cold-autumn wind, his bright necktie blowing, watching Oliver get into his car and start off toward the hotel where he was to meet Tony.

Oliver went to the bar of the hotel to wait for Tony. He ordered a whisky to take the taste of the academic sherry out of his mouth, and thought over what the headmaster had said, the gentle warnings, the unfavorable judgments, the delicate avoidance of comment on the fact that Tony’s mother, in all the two years that the boy had been at the school, had never put in an appearance. Well, that was one of the things a teacher was for—to show you your son in the light that others saw him, to prepare you for what he was probably going to be like as a man. Staring somberly into his whisky glass, Oliver realized that, as kindly as possible, the headmaster had been trying to tell him that he foresaw Tony as a lonely and unpopular man, with no great taste or aptitude for work, and an unpleasantly sharp and mocking attitude toward the people around him. Oliver sipped his whisky, resenting the headmaster and his confidence in his own judgment and his sense of prophecy. All these people, Oliver thought defensively, are wrong most of the time. That’s why they became teachers in the first place. When he had been Tony’s age, his own teachers, he knew, had predicted vague but glittering glories for him. He had been a tall, handsome, easygoing boy who hardly had to study at all to get the highest marks in his class, who had been a leader in all games, a captain of teams, a president of clubs and classes, a precocious and graceful squire of young ladies. Well, Oliver thought grimly, hunched over his glass, they ought to come and take a look at me now.

Thinking again of Hollis, he wondered what made him so confident of himself. Having a small, definite, achievable aim, and achieving it early? Being surrounded by the gray, unchallenging, semi-failures who made up the faculties of small, country schools? Dictating, with affable severity, to hundreds of boys who passed out of his life before they became old enough seriously to oppose him, and whose later estimates of him would never come back to him? Living always by a comfortable curriculum that hardly changed from one year to the next—so many hours for Latin, so many for sport, so many for the neat, adolescent adoration of God and the laying down of proper, devout rules? Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father, thou shalt learn to recognize the ablative absolute, thou shalt not cheat on examinations, thou shalt prepare thyself for Harvard. And, along with all these solid foundations and secure passageways, having a pretty, buxom young wife who had come to him with a little money of her own, and who saw him always in a position of command, and who, because of his job, worked with him daily, almost hourly, so that each year their interdependence became cozier and more useful and intimate. Maybe the next time Oliver went into that cheerful office and shook that hearty hand, he would murmur, delphically, “Remember Leontes …”

All goes well, Teacher? Oliver thought, grinning at his own vulgarity. Try sending your wife to the mountains for a summer.

He was about to order another whisky when through the open doorway of the bar, he saw Tony coming into the lobby of the hotel.

Tony hadn’t seen his father and Oliver watched him for a few seconds, as Tony peered, a little near-sightedly, through his glasses, around the hotel lobby. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat and his tweed jacket was too short in the sleeves for him and he was carrying, rather clumsily, a large square of drawing board under one arm. He was taller than Oliver remembered, although he had seen him only six weeks before, and he looked thin and undernourished and cold from the sharp November wind. His hair was long and fine, in contrast to all the other close-cropped students whom Oliver had passed on the campus, and he seemed to hold himself nervously and challengingly. He had a big head, too large for his thin shoulders, and his features had fined down and his nose seemed too long for the rest of his face and to Oliver he seemed to have the air of some queer, half-timid, half-dangerous bird, solitary, ruffled, uncertain whether to fly or attack.

Looking at his son, Oliver had a strange double image. In the long nose and the fair hair and the large gray eyes, even behind the glasses, he could see Lucy’s inheritance, and the broad, slightly domed forehead and the big, firm mouth made him remember, confusedly, photographs of himself when he was in school. But none of it seemed to hang together. The air of challenge, the feeling of suspicion, almost, that Tony brought with him, seemed to keep the elements of his face and body from fusing.

Then Tony saw him, and waved, and came into the bar, and when he was up close and shaking Oliver’s hand, familiarity wiped out the fragmentary impressions, and it was just Tony, grave, polite, well known.

They went into lunch and after the first ten minutes in which they discussed what they wanted to have and Oliver asked the usual questions about how Tony felt and how things were going in class and if he needed anything, and Tony gave the usual answers, the periods of silence grew, as usual, longer and longer and harder for each of them to bear. Oliver was sure that if he never came to see Tony, both he and Tony would be happier for it. But that was out of the question, although it would be hard to say why.

Observing Tony across the table, Oliver noted that the boy ate politely, spilled nothing, moved his hands deftly and with precision. He kept his eyes down, and only once or twice during the meal, when Oliver for the moment had looked away and then suddenly turned back, did he catch Tony watching him, thoughtfully, without malice or love. When Tony caught Oliver’s glance, he lowered his eyes, without haste, and continued eating, calmly and silently. It was only when they were eating dessert that Oliver suddenly realized that there had been something about the boy’s appearance that had been bothering him ever since they had shaken hands. A heavy, long, blond fuzz had come out on Tony’s upper lip and chin and there were isolated tufts of fine, curly hair along his jaws. It gave him a shaggy and unkempt look, like a puppy that has walked through a puddle.

Oliver didn’t say anything about it for a while, but he kept staring at the uneven, fine beard on his son’s face. Of course, he thought. He’s almost sixteen.

“Mr. Hollis,” Oliver said, “told me that he was going to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner at his house tomorrow.”

Tony nodded, without pleasure. “If I have time,” he said, “I’ll go.”

“He’s a pretty good fellow, Mr. Hollis,” Oliver said heartily, glad of a subject for conversation, avoiding, with a twinge of guilt, asking what other plans Tony might have for the holiday. “He’s been watching you pretty closely. He says you have a lot of talent. The cartoons, I mean, for the paper …”

“I draw most of them in his class,” Tony said, neatly spooning up his chocolate ice cream. “It keeps me from falling asleep.”

“What does he teach?” Oliver asked, avoiding a more searching question about Tony’s estimate of Mr. Hollis.

“European history. He’s crazy about. Napoleon. He’s only five feet four inches tall, so he’s crazy about Napoleon.”

Was I that mean, Oliver thought, was I that observant, when I was fifteen years old?