Lucy Crown (31 page)

They passed family groups picnicking along the roadside, seated on chairs at collapsible small tables with cloths on the tables and wine bottles and tiny vases of flowers next to the long loaves of bread. From time to time they passed through shell-marked villages where ruined walls stood, softened by the weather, looking as though they had been that way for hundreds of years. Lucy tried to think of what the houses had looked like before the shells had hit and what it must have been like at the moment of impact, with the stone flying and the smoke and the people calling to one another from under the collapsing walls. But she couldn’t manage it. The ruins looked permanent, peaceful, undangerous—the picnickers, with their wine bottles and carnations and tablecloths looked as though they had never missed a summer. Where was I, she thought, when this belfry toppled into this stone square? I was preparing lunch in a kitchen three thousand miles away. I was walking across the linoleum to the electric toaster and opening the refrigerator door to take out two tomatoes and a jar of mayonnaise.

She looked across at her son. His face was expressionless, his eyes set on the road. He paid no attention to the picnickers or to the residue of war. If you live in Europe, Lucy thought, I suppose you become accustomed to ruins.

She felt exhausted. Her forehead ached dully from the repetitious, liquid blows of the wind and her eyelids kept drooping heavily over her eyes. Her stomach felt knotted and the top of her girdle bit into her flesh and it was difficult to move enough in the small leather seat to relieve the pressure. From time to time there was the taste of nausea, induced by weariness, in her throat, and when she looked over at Tony he seemed to be swimming minutely at the wheel.

There is something I should be able to say, she thought confusedly, to change him from a stranger into a son, but I am too tired to think of it.

She closed her eyes and dozed, passing swiftly between the fresh fields and the weathered ruins.

Well, now, Tony kept thinking, well, now. Here she is at last. If you have a mother it is too much to hope for that she will not finally put in an appearance.

He glanced over at her. Sleeping comfortably, he thought, happily digesting the day’s emotion, placidly nourishing herself on death, reunions, tears and guilt. Still pretty, even in the scarf and the harsh light, still—at fifty-three, fifty-four?—with that sliding hint of sex and invitation that he hadn’t recognized when he was a boy, but which in retrospect, and after knowing so many other women, he now could recognize so well. Still robust, with firm shoulders and a shapely bosom and clear skin and those damned long gray Eastern eyes. How long would she stay, he wondered, before going home again. A week, two weeks? Long enough to damage him and to try her hand at the French, to whom a woman in her fifties, especially one who looked like her, was interesting game. Long enough to open wounds, demand grief, claim kinship, visit graves, produce tears, disturb security, flirt in a new language, sample foreign beds …

We sat at my father’s grave and made the summer air over the crosses ring with dirty stories. We stopped the sport car at the spot where the bullet hit him and remembered that he was a fool. On the road to the summer resorts we left our tire marks in the dried blood, and winking, repeated the gag line of the joke. It is men’s night and women’s night at the smoker in the military cemetery and we amused the ghosts steadily for eighteen short years. We tore the white flag up into bedsheets and slept in comical surrenders. It is the height of the tourist season and all over the Continent, Mama and Mama’s boy are visiting the monuments. To the left we have Mont Saint Michel. To the right, observe disaster. Diagonally, at a point close to the interesting fourteenth-century Norman church, which unfortunately was hit in an air raid, notice the ditch into which Papa rolled when the machine gun hit him. He was a firm believer in the Geneva Convention, Papa, who should have been wiser about conventions.

Regard Mama’s boy at the wheel. The car is smart, though inexpensive, and is used extensively by photographers who wish to make pictures of people on holiday. In a pinch, it is suitable for funerals, if the funerals have taken place long enough ago in the past. The expression on the face of Mama’s boy is also smart, although, unlike the automobile, it did not come cheaply.

Lucy opened her eyes. “Are we nearly there?” she asked.

“Another two hours,” Tony said. “Go back to sleep.”

Lucy smiled tentatively, half-awake, then closed her eyes again. Tony glanced across at her again momentarily, then stared once more at the road. It was narrow and humped in the middle and its surface had been roughly repaired many times and the car jolted as it hit the filled-in places. There was a smell of tar, melting stickily at the road edges in the sun.

How easy it would be, Tony thought, squinting at the heat waves rising from the middle distance, to speed up just a little more and, with one turn of the wheel, slam off the road into a tree. How easy. How definite.

He grinned, thinking of his mother sleeping trustingly at his side. That would teach her, he thought, not to pick up rides with strange men. He stared at the heat waves, shimmering and oily on each small rise of the road, disappearing like mist as the car rushed on.

The grave waits, he thought. The scene of the death is two hours away by small, open car. This is the spot on which my father was killed … But is it, really? Or was he killed long before he reached the crossroads, on another continent, except that the deed was done quietly and none of the participants, including the victim, admitted to it until a long time later? It isn’t as simple as it seems, Tony thought, to fix the point in time and space in which a father dies.

His eyes on the road ahead of him, Tony thought of the last time he saw his father.

He was twenty years old and it was in New York, and the evening started at a bar near Madison Avenue, and his father was standing with a glass in his hand, looking fit and soldierly in his uniform, with the ribbon from the First World War on it.

It was about seven o’clock and the room was full, with many uniforms and well-dressed women with fur coats who looked as though they were pleased there was a war on. It was cold and rainy outside and people came in rubbing their hands, hurrying a little, showing how happy they were to be in a warm place, with a war on and a drink coming up. There was a pianist in a corner, playing songs from
Oklahoma. Pore Jud is daid,
he played, singing it softly.

Oliver had called Tony at the dormitory about an hour before, sounding jovial and a little mysterious, saying, “Tony, you better drop everything and come and have dinner with your old man. It may be the last chance you get.”

Tony hadn’t known that his father was anywhere near New York. The last he’d heard Oliver had been down South somewhere. After he had received his commission in Intelligence, because the only thing he’d been offered in the Air Force had been a desk in Washington, Oliver had wandered inconclusively around training camps for two years, appearing on leaves from time to time in New York, without warning, for a dinner or two, then disappearing once more to some new station. When he thought of it, Tony was sure that his father would never get out of the country, but would greet the armistice foolishly and uselessly in an officers’ club in the Carolinas or in a troop train heading slowly toward the Middle West.

They shook hands when Tony came in. Oliver put an excessive amount of force into his grip, as though almost automatically these days, in all situations, he felt that he had to prove that the uniform made him more youthful and potent than he looked. The Army had slimmed him down a bit and the belt of his tunic was flat across his stomach. His dark hair was shot with gray and cut short. From a distance, with his weatherbeaten face and the rough, sturdy hair and the flat-stomached tunic he looked almost like the drawings of senior officers that were filling the advertising sections of the magazines. He was not a senior officer however. He wore major’s leaves (he had had only one promotion since he had been commissioned) and when you came up close to him you saw that there were grayish puffs under his eyes, which were unhealthily yellowed, and which had the nervous searching expression of the man who is too vain to wear glasses, or is afraid to admit to his superiors that his eyes are not as sharp as they should be. His face, too, which at a distance seemed healthily conditioned-down, was, when examined closely, more haggard than muscular, and there was a hidden muddy tone of fatigue under the skin.

He smiled widely as he shook Tony’s hand. “Well,” he said. “It’s good to see you. What’re you drinking?”

Tony would have preferred to decline, since he didn’t like to drink. But he thought, I’m not in uniform, the least I can do is drink for him. He looked at his father’s glass. “What’re you having?” he asked.

“Bourbon. Good old Kentucky Bourbon,” Oliver said. “Stocking up.”

“Bourbon,” Tony said to the bartender.

“The best in the house,” Oliver said. He waved jovially and vaguely to the bartender and Tony wondered how long he had been drinking.

“Yes, sir,” said the bartender.

“You look fine, Son,” Oliver said. “Just fine.”

“I’m all right,” Tony said, wincing a little at the “Son.” Until Oliver had gone into the Army, he had always called him by his name. Tony wondered what obscure military motivation had effected the change.

“A little thin,” Oliver was saying judiciously, “a little pale. You don’t look as though you’re getting any exercise.”

“I feel all right,” Tony said defensively.

“You’d be surprised,” Oliver said, “how many boys are rejected every day. Young boys. You’d think they’d be in A-number-one condition. The widest variety of ailments. City living,” Oliver said. “The soft life. White bread. No manual labor.”

“I could be built like Joe Louis,” Tony said mildly, wanting to get off the subject, “and they’d still reject me.”

“Of course, of course,” Oliver said hastily. “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking generally. I wasn’t talking about particular cases. The results of accidents. Things like that.” He was embarrassed and Tony was relieved when the bartender put his glass down in front of him on the bar and they could move off the subject. Tony lifted his glass.

“To victory,” Oliver said solemnly.

Tony would have liked it better if his father had picked something else to drink to, but he clinked glasses, feeling a little melodramatic in the softly lit bar, in the civilian suit, with the pretty women in furs and the man at the piano.

“I heard about a steak place,” Oliver said. “On Third Avenue. A little on the black-market side.” He grinned. “But what the hell! Nothing’s too good for the troops. Where I’m going there’ll be damn few steaks.”

“Are you going overseas?” Tony asked.

Oliver looked around slyly. “I wouldn’t say yes and I wouldn’t say no.” He clapped Tony’s shoulder and laughed. “Anyway, I can give you a hint. Take a good long look at your old man. You won’t see him again for a long, long time.”

He wasn’t like this, Tony thought wearily. No matter how young I was, I couldn’t have been that wrong.

“Maybe it’ll be over soon,” Tony said.

“Don’t you kid yourself, Son,” Oliver said. His voice dropped to a whisper and he leaned closer to Tony. His breath had an afternoon’s whisky on it. “This is a long, long job, Son. If you’d seen what I’ve seen. If you’d heard some of the things …” He shook his head portentously with morbid proprietary satisfaction for his inside information about the duration and future miseries of the war. “Bartender,” he said. “Two more.”

“One, please,” Tony said to the bartender. “I’ll string along with this for a while.”

“When I was in college,” Oliver said, “we only refused a drink when we dropped below the level of the bar.”

“I have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”

“Sure. Sure.” Oliver nervously wiped his mouth with his hand, suddenly conscious of his breath. “I was only kidding. I’m glad to see you’re serious. I mean that. It makes me feel that maybe, with all the mistakes, maybe I didn’t do too bad a job with you. Too many boys these days …” He wavered, because Tony had ducked his head and was playing with his glass. “What I mean is, too damned many boys these days … Well, all they think of is drinking and screwing and having a good time and the hell with the future.”

Every single damn time he sees me, Tony thought, he uses that word. If he does it once more, I’m getting out. I don’t care where he’s going.

“Not that I’m against it, you understand,” Oliver said, with the wide, vague, jovial movement of his arm. “Far from it. Does a boy good. In its place. Talk about wild oats.” He laughed and drained his drink as the bartender came up with the new one. “I was one of the leading wild-oat sowers of my time. You can imagine. A young lieutenant in France after the Armistice.” He shook his head and chuckled. Then he suddenly grew serious, as though at the back of his head, beyond the fumes of whisky, past the moment and the recent memory of barracks, a distant light was shining. “But I’ll say one thing for myself. Most men—they sow their wild oats when they’re young and then, by God, they’re in the habit, and they’re pinching the nurse on their deathbed. Not me. I did it. I don’t deny it and I don’t say I’m ashamed of it. And I stopped.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Once and for all.”

He peered down at his glass, holding it in both hands, his eyes reflective and serious and no longer clownish, his cheeks drawn and unmilitary.

The pianist had switched songs now.
Many a new face will please my eye,
he was singing softly,
many a new …

“Your mother,” Oliver said, still playing with the glass with his roughened hands. “Have you heard from her?”

“No,” said Tony.

“She’s doing a big job, now, you know …”

“Is she?” Tony said politely, wishing Oliver would stop talking about her.

“In the laboratory at the hospital at Fort Dix,” Oliver said. “All sorts of blood tests and work on tropical fevers and things like that. When we got into the war she decided that it’d be a shame to let her training go to waste, and I agreed with her. She’d forgotten a lot and she had to work like the devil to get back to it, but she didn’t stint herself. She has six assistants working under her now. You’d be proud of her.”