Lucy Crown (8 page)

“I return the book,” he said, giving it to her. “I admit I am a fool. I admit everything.” He grinned at her tentatively. “I even admit I was nineteen years old last summer. I don’t remember anything you don’t want me to remember. I don’t remember that I ever said that you were a magnificent woman and I don’t remember that I ever did anything but praise Oliver Crown as a paragon among men. And above all, I don’t remember that I ever kissed you. I am abject in the most Eastern, Oriental, abject way and I promise to remain abject from this date until Labor Day.”

He waited for her to smile, but she didn’t smile. She found her place again in the book.

“I am as humble as the worm,” Jeff said, watching her closely, “I am as respectful as a millionaire’s butler, I am as sexless as a seventy-year-old eunuch in a home for aged Turks … There,” he said triumphantly. “You laughed.”

“All right,” Lucy said, seating herself again. “You can stay. On one condition.”

“What condition?” He looked down at her suspiciously.

“You must promise not to be serious.”

“I will be so frivolous,” he said gravely, “that little children will turn from me in disgust.”

Across the lake the bugle from the boys’ camp blew, and as if this were a signal for him, he made a stiff, wide salute, and turned, with military precision, on his heel, saying, “I leave you now. I go to devote my life to the pursuit of the three-leaf clover.”

He walked off slowly, head down, staring at the ground and started a methodical, quartering course over the lawn, stopping from time to time to bend over and pick one of the small plants. Lucy sat there, against the tree, her eyes half-closed, conscious of the white-shirted figure moving across the sunlit grass with the lake shining behind him and the mountains pale blue in the mid-day heat.
He watched me all summer,
she thought drowsily,
now what about that?

6

“N
OW LOOK, LUCY, YOU
must remember where you put it,” Oliver was saying over the phone, his voice loaded with the weary patience which Lucy knew so well and which always froze her into a state of near-amnesia, because she knew what exasperated impatience it disguised. “Think hard.”

“I
am
thinking hard,” Lucy said, and she knew she sounded sullen and childish, but she couldn’t help it. “I’m sure I left all the bills in my desk.”

She was standing in the living room in the cottage as she spoke, watching Tony and Jeff playing chess under the light of a lamp at the big table in the middle of the room. Both of them were concentrating, heads close together over the board, Tony because he was determined to win and Jeff because he was being polite and did not want to seem to be listening to the conversation on the phone being conducted six feet away from him.

“Lucy, darling,” Oliver’s voice now compounded both the weariness and the patience, “I’ve looked twice in your desk. It’s not there. You’ve got bills from 1932 there and recipes for fish soup and an invitation to the wedding of two people who were divorced three years ago—but the bill from the garage is not there. I repeat,” he said slowly, in that maddening voice, “the bill for the garage is not there.”

She felt like crying. Whenever Oliver got after her for the inefficiency with which she ran the household accounts, she had a flustered, tragic sense that the modern world was too complicated for her, that unknown people came into her room when she was absent and maliciously rifled her papers, that Oliver was sure she was an idiot and regretted marrying her. If Tony and Jeff hadn’t been there she would have cried, which would have had the advantage of making Oliver relent and say, “The hell with it. It isn’t that important. I’ll straighten it out somehow.”

But even though neither Tony nor Jeff was watching her she couldn’t cry, of course. All she could say was, “I’m sure I paid it. I’m absolutely sure.”

“Jenkins says no,” Oliver said. Jenkins was the owner of the garage and Lucy despised him because he had a trick of turning from the warmest affability to whining protest when people made him wait for his money past the fifth of the month.

“Whose word are you going to take?” Lucy asked. “Jenkins’ or mine?”

“Well, it’s not in the checkbook,” Oliver said, and she could have screamed at the thin, distant persistence of the voice on the phone, “and I can’t find the receipted bill and he was most obnoxious about it today when I stopped in for gas. It’s very embarrassing, Lucy, to have a man come up to you and say you’ve owed him seventy dollars for three months, when you’ve thought you’ve paid it.”

“We
have
paid it,” Lucy said stubbornly, not remembering anything.

“Lucy, I repeat,” Oliver said, “we must have the bill.”

“What do you want me to do?” she cried, her voice rising, despite herself. “Come down and look for it myself? If that’s what you want, I’ll take the train tomorrow morning.”

Jeff looked up quickly at this, then returned to the game.

“Guard your queen,” he said to Tony.

“I have a deadly plan,” Tony said. “Watch.”

“No, no,” Oliver said wearily. “I’ll talk to him myself. Forget it.”

When he said, Forget it, Lucy knew that it was a sentence on her, a small, recurrent, punitive, mounting sentence.

“How are things up there?” Oliver asked, but coolly, disciplining her. “How’s Tony?”

“He’s playing chess with Jeff,” said Lucy. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Yes, please.”

Lucy put the phone down. “Your father wants to talk to you, Tony,” she said. She started out of the room, as Tony said, “Hi, Dad.”

She was conscious that Jeff was watching her as she went out onto the porch and she had a feeling that she looked tense and humiliated.

“We saw a deer today,” Tony was saying. “He came down to the lake to drink.”

Lucy moved off across the lawn toward the shore of the lake because she didn’t want to have to talk to Oliver again. The moon was full and it was a warm night and a slight milky mist was rising from the water. From the opposite shore came the sound of the bugle. Every night after taps at the camp there, the bugler gave a short concert. Tonight he was playing French cavalry calls, very well, and the strange, quick music made the whole scene, with the borders of the lake softened and almost obscured by the rising mist, seem unfamiliar and melancholy.

Lucy stood there, holding her bare arms because of the little chill along the edge of the water, allowing her irritation to be soothed by the moonlight and the bugle calls into self-pity.

She heard the steps behind her, but she didn’t turn around and when Jeff put his arms around her she had the feeling not of a woman being pursued by a young man, but of a child taken under mature protection. And when she turned around and he kissed her, although it soon changed into something else, she had the feeling that she had been bruised and that her hurt was being assuaged. She felt his hands, smooth and hard, on the bare flesh of her back, gentle, searching, demanding. She pulled her head away and, still embraced, put her face against his shoulder.

“Oh, Lord …” Jeff whispered. He put his hand under her chin and tried to pull her head up, but she resisted and pushed deeper into the loose flannel of his shirt.

“No,” she said. “No. No more …”

“Later,” he whispered. “I have the house all to myself. My sister’s in town for the week.”

“Stop it.”

“I’ve been so good,” Jeff said. “I can’t any more. Lucy …”

“Mother …” It was Tony’s voice, high and childish, carrying across the lawn from the house. “Mother …”

Lucy broke away and hurried across the lawn.

“Yes, Tony,” she called, as she reached the porch.

“Daddy wants to know if you want to talk to him again.”

Lucy stopped and leaned against the pillar of the porch, trying to breathe properly. “Not unless he has something he particularly wants to say to me,” she said, through the open window.

“Mother says only if you have something you particularly want to say to her,” Tony said into the phone.

She waited. There was silence for a moment and then Tony said, “Okay. I will. So long,” and she heard the click of the phone as he hung up. He poked his head out through the window, lifting the screen.

“Mother,” he called.

“I’m here,” she said, from the shadows of the porch.

“Daddy said to tell you he can’t come up this week-end,” he said. “There’s a man coming in from Detroit he has to see.”

“All right, Tony,” she said, watching Jeff coming slowly through the moonlight across the lawn toward the house. “Now, if you’re going to sleep out here, you’d better start getting your bed ready.”

“We haven’t finished the chess game yet,” Tony said. “I have him in a gruesome position.”

“Finish it tomorrow,” said Lucy. “You’ll still have him in a gruesome position.”

“Righteo,” Tony said, and pulled his head inside the house, letting the screen fall with a bang.

Jeff came onto the porch and stood in front of her. He started to put out his arms toward her, but she moved off and switched on the lamp that stood on the rattan table near the big glider on which Tony was going to sleep.

“Lucy,” Jeff whispered, following her. “Don’t run away.”

“It didn’t happen,” she said. Nervously, she pushed one of Tony’s shirts, on which she had been sewing buttons that afternoon, into a sewing basket that was on the table. “Nothing happened. Forget it. I beg you. Forget it.”

“Never,” he said, standing close to her. He put out his hand and touched her mouth. “Your lips …”

She heard herself moan and even as the sound came from her she was surprised at it. She had the feeling that she was losing control of the simplest mechanical gestures, the movement of her arms, the voice in her throat. “No,” she said and pushed past Jeff, scraping harshly at her mouth with the back of her hand.

Tony came out, loaded with bedclothes, and dumped them on the glider. “Listen, Jeff,” he said. “You’re not to study the board until tomorrow morning.”

“What? What’s that?” Jeff turned slowly toward the boy.

“No unfair advantages,” Tony said. “You promise?”

“I promise,” Jeff said. He smiled stiffly at Tony, then bent over and picked up Tony’s telescope, which was lying under a chair, and seemed to become absorbed in polishing the lens with the sleeve of his shirt.

Lucy watched Tony as he began to arrange the sheets and the blankets on the glider. “You’re sure you want to sleep out here tonight?” she asked, thinking, I will be motherly, that will bring me back. “You won’t be too cold?”

“It’s not cold,” Tony said cheerfully. “Millions of people sleep out in the summertime, don’t they, Jeff?”

“Millions,” Jeff said, still polishing the lens of the telescope. He was seated now and he was bent over and Lucy couldn’t see his face.

“Soldiers, hunters, mountain climbers,” said Tony. “I’m going to write Daddy and ask him to bring me a sleeping bag. Then I can sleep out in the snow, too.”

“You’ll have plenty of time for that,” Jeff said. He stood up and Lucy, watching him, saw that his face was quiet, unchanged, and that his expression was once more the usual one of friendly and skeptical indulgence that he displayed to Tony.

I have to be careful of him, Lucy thought. He is too resilient for me. It is not only the waists of young men that are flexible.

“Plenty of time, Tony,” Jeff said carelessly. “In World War Twelve.”

“That isn’t funny,” Lucy said sharply. She went over and started helping Tony make up the glider for the night.

“Pardon,” Jeff said. “World War Fifteen.”

“Don’t be sore at him, Mummy,” Tony said. “We have a deal. He talks to me just as though I was twenty years old.”

“There won’t be any World War Twelve or Fifteen or World War Anything,” Lucy said. She was frightened of the idea of war and she refused to read any of the news from Spain, where the Civil War had been going on for a year, and she had successfully prevented Oliver from buying tin soldiers or air-rifles for Tony when he was younger. Actually, she would not have been so touchy on the subject if somehow she could have been guaranteed that whatever war took place would come at a time when Tony was either too young or too old to be involved in it. If she had been forced to state her position she would have said that patriotism was only for people with large families. “Talk about something else,” she said.

“Talk about something else, Tony,” Jeff said obediently.

“Did you look at the moon tonight, Jeff?” Tony asked. “It’s nearly full. You can see just about everything.”

“The moon,” said Jeff. He lay down on his back on the floor of the porch and took one of the wooden chairs and up-ended it, holding it steady between his knees. He used the crossbar as a rest for the telescope and squinted off into the sky.

“What’re you doing there?” Lucy asked, almost suspiciously.

“Tony showed me this,” Jeff said, adjusting the telescope. “You’ve got to have a steady field, don’t you, Tony?”

“Otherwise,” Tony said, working busily on the glider, “the stars blur.”

“And one thing, we won’t have around here,” said Jeff, “is blurred stars.” He made a final quarter turn on the tube. “Consider the unblurred moon,” he said professorially. “An interesting place to visit, if you like traveling. Sail on a stone boat across the Mare Crisium … In English, Tony?”

“Sea of Crises,” Tony said automatically.

“Crises,” Jeff said. “Even on the cold, dead moon.”

He couldn’t have meant what he said before, Lucy thought resentfully, he was just trying it on, if he can play like this with Tony now.

“And to the south,” Jeff was saying, “a more pleasant place. The Mare Foecunditas.”

“The Sea of Fertility,” Tony said promptly.

“We will dip you in that two or three times, just to make sure.” Jeff grinned, lying there on his back, with the telescope pointed toward the stars.

“Jeff,” Lucy said, warningly.

“The Sea of Tranquility, the Marsh of Sleep, the Lake of Dreams,” Jeff went on, as though he hadn’t heard her, his deep youthful voice with its pleasant, educated touch of Boston making a trance-like music out of the names. “Maybe the moon is the place to move to this century, after all. When were you born, Tony?”