Lucy Crown (9 page)

“March twenty-sixth,” Tony said. He was making an elaborate hospital corner with the sheets and the blankets on the lower edge of the glider mattress.

“Aries,” Jeff said. He put the telescope down and lay with his head back on the wooden flooring of the porch. His eyes were closed now, as though he were searching for visions, listening to unworldly voices, waiting for omens from the heavens. “The sign of the Ram, the horned beast in the heavens. Do you know how the Ram got there, Tony?”

“Do you believe in that stuff?” Tony stopped his work on the bed for a moment and looked at Jeff.

“I believe in everything,” Jeff said, still with his eyes closed, his voice liturgical and solemn. “I believe in the Zodiac and luck and transmigration of souls and sacrifice and secret diplomacy, secretly arrived at.”

“Human sacrifice,” Tony said incredulously. “Did people ever really do that?”

“Of course,” Jeff said.

“Until when?” Tony asked skeptically.

“Until yesterday at three-fifteen
P.M.
It’s the only kind of sacrifice that ever does any good,” Jeff said. “Wait until you’ve tried it two or three times, Tony, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“All right, Jeff, that’s enough of that,” Lucy said, thinking, He’s deliberately provoking me, he’s revenging himself on me. “Tony, pay attention here.”

“Phrixus and Helle,” Jeff said, almost as if she hadn’t spoken, “sons of the King of Thessaly, were badly treated by their stepmother …”

“Is this educational?” Lucy said, determined to show nothing.

“Enormously,” Jeff said.

“What was her name?” Tony asked.

“Who?”

“The stepmother.”

“That’s in the next lesson,” Jeff said. “So Mercury took pity on the boys and sent a ram with golden fleece to help them escape. The ram carried them on his back, high above the earth and everything was going fine until they came to the strait that separates Europe from Asia. Then Helle fell and was drowned and they call the water the Hellespont to this day. And when Phrixus reached Colchis, which was a lively town when the weather was right, he sacrificed the ram in gratitude and Jupiter set the poor dead flying beast among the stars in recognition of his service to the king’s son …”

Lucy looked down curiously at Jeff. “Did you know all this before you met Tony?” she asked.

“Not a word,” Jeff said. “I go home and study every night so that Tony will think I’m the smartest man that ever lived.” He smiled. “I want him to be disappointed with every teacher he has from now on and get disgusted with education and never listen to any one of them again. It’s the least I can do for him.” He sat up suddenly, his face naïve and open, his eyes shining candidly in the light of the lamp. “Tony,” he said, “show your mother how you breathe when you swim.”

“Like this,” Tony said, ducking his head and making a swimming motion with his arms. “Kick, one, two, three, four,
BREATHE
!” He put his head to one side and opened his mouth wide at one corner, as though it was half in and half out of the water, and sucked in air with a loud, wet sound.

“Isn’t there a more gentlemanly way to breathe?” Lucy asked, thinking, The danger is over, everything is back to normal.

“No,” Jeff said, “I taught him that, too.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor now, he addressed Tony. “Do you think your father is getting his money’s worth out of me?”

“Well,” Tony said, teasing him, “almost.”

“Lie a little in your next letter,” Jeff said. “For friendship’s sake.” He stood up, picking up the telescope. He put the telescope to his eye and regarded Tony, at a distance of ten feet. “You will have to shave,” he said solemnly, “in exactly three years, two months, and fourteen days.”

Tony laughed and rubbed his chin.

“I have a question to ask you, young man.” Jeff came over to the glider and leaned against the chain, making it swing a little. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I went home with you after Labor Day and stayed with you this winter to smarten you up some more?”

“Do you think you could do that?” Lucy could see that Tony was deeply pleased with the idea.

“Don’t stop, Tony,” Lucy said sharply. “Jeff was joking. He has to go back to college and be sensible again until next summer. Stop swinging on the chain, please, Jeff, it’s hard enough to make this up as it is.”

“One thing I don’t like about summers,” Tony said, “toward the end, they go too fast. Will I really see you this winter, Jeff?”

“Of course,” Jeff said. “Get your mother to bring you up to Dartmouth. For the football games and the winter carnival.”

“Mother, do you think we can go?”

“Maybe,” Lucy said, because she didn’t want to make an issue of it. “If Jeff remembers to invite us.”

“Tomorrow, Tony,” said Jeff, “I’ll stab myself in the hand and print the invitation in blood and that constitutes a holy contract. We’ll pull wires and get your mother elected Queen of the Carnival and they’ll take her picture sitting on top of a snowball and everybody’ll say, ‘By gum, there’s never been anything like that in New Hampshire before.’”

Lucy glanced uneasily at Tony. If he were a year older, she thought, he would catch on. Maybe even now … “Stop it,” she said to Jeff, risking alerting Tony. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of you,” Jeff said slowly. He walked to the edge of the porch and looked once more at the sky through the telescope. “Mars,” he said, making his voice throaty and dramatic. “The low, baleful, red, unwinking planet. That’s your ruling planet, Tony, because you’re Aries. Favorable to slaughter and the arts of war. Become a soldier, Tony, and you’ll take a hundred towns and be at least a lieutenant colonel by the age of twenty-three.”

“Now, really, Jeff,” Lucy said, “that’s enough of that nonsense.”

“Nonsense?” Jeff said, sounding surprised. “Tony, do you think it’s nonsense?”

“Yes,” Tony said judiciously. “But it’s interesting.”

“People have been guiding their lives by the stars for five thousand years. The Kings of Egypt …” Jeff said. “Lucy,” and his voice was like a mischievous boy’s now, “when were you born?”

“A long time ago.”

“Tony, what’s your mother’s birthday?”

“August twenty-fifth.” Tony was enjoying this and he appealed to Lucy. “It can’t do any harm.”

“August twenty-fifth,” Jeff repeated. “The sign of Virgo. The Virgin …”

“Mother …” Tony looked inquiringly at Lucy.

“I’ll explain some other time.”

“In the region of the Euphrates,” Jeff went on, now pretending to be a lecturer and speaking rapidly and with no inflection, “it was identified with Venus, who was sad and perfect and was worshiped by lovers. The ruling planet is Mercury, the brightest star, which always keeps the same side turned to the sun and is frozen on one side and burning on the other. Virgoans are shy and fear to be brilliant …”

“Now,” said Lucy, feeling he had gone far enough, “where did you pick up all this foolishness?”

“Madame Vietcha’s
Book of the Stars,”
Jeff said, grinning. “Thirty-five cents at any good bookstore or at your druggist’s. Virgoans fear impurity and disorder and are liable to peptic ulcers. When they love, they love passionately and place a high premium on fidelity …”

“And how about you?” Lucy interrupted, almost with hostility, forgetting Tony for the instant, challenging Jeff. “What about your horoscope?”

“Aaah …” Jeff put the telescope down and wagged his head. “Mine is too sad to relate. I’m in opposition to my stars. They sit up there”—he waved sadly at the sky—“winking, defying me, saying, ‘Not a chance, not a chance …” I want to lead and they advise me to follow. I want to be brave and they say, Caution. I want to be great and they say, Perhaps in another life. I say, Love, and they say, Disaster. I’m a hero in the wrong twelfth of the Zodiac.”

There were footsteps on the gravel path alongside the porch and a moment later Lucy saw a young girl in blue jeans and a loose sweater come into view. For a moment Lucy didn’t recognize her, then saw that it was the daughter of a Mrs. Nickerson whom she had met at the hotel that afternoon. Tony halted work on the glider to stare at her.

“Hello,” the Nickerson girl said, coming onto the porch. She was a plump and prematurely developed girl and the blue jeans were stretched tight across her solid little behind. Her hair was streaked and Lucy noted disapprovingly that it had almost certainly been touched up. “Hello,” she repeated, standing with her legs widespread and her hands plunged into the pockets of the blue jeans. She looked around her with the unabashed self-possession of an animal trainer. “I’m Susan Nickerson,” she said, and if you closed your eyes you would have been sure it was a mature and rather unpleasant woman speaking. “We were introduced this afternoon.”

“Of course, Susan,” Lucy said. “This is my son Tony.”

“Delighted,” Susan said crisply. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.” Jeff made a face.

“My mother sent me over, Mrs. Crown,” Susan said, “to ask if you’d like to make a fourth at bridge tonight.”

Jeff glanced swiftly across at Lucy, then leaned over and picked up the chair that he had up-ended on the floor to observe the stars.

Lucy hesitated. She thought of the veranda of the hotel and the seared ranks of seasonal widows there. “Not tonight, Susan,” she said. “Tell your mother thank you, but I’m tired and I’m going to bed early.”

“Okay,” Susan said flatly.

“Bridge,” said Jeff, “has put this country further back than Prohibition.”

Susan inspected him coldly. She had bright, cold, blue, coin-like eyes. “I know about you,” she said. She had the trick of making the simplest statement sound like an accusation. It will come in very handy, Lucy thought, noticing it, if she later decides to become a policewoman.

Jeff laughed. “Maybe you’d better keep it to yourself, Susan,” he said.

“You’re the Dartmouth boy,” she said. “My mother thinks you’re very handsome.”

Jeff nodded gravely, agreeing. “And what do you think?” he asked.

“You’re all right.” She shrugged, a small, plump movement under the loose sweater. “They’d never take you in the movies, though.”

“I was afraid of that,” Jeff said. “And how long are you going to be here?”

“I hope not long,” the girl said. “I like Nevada better.”

“Why?” Jeff asked.

“There was more happening,” Susan said. “This place is dead. It’s got the wrong age groups. They don’t even have movies, except on Saturdays and week-ends. What do you do here at night?”

“We look at the stars,” said Tony, who had been watching her, fascinated.

“Ummn,” Susan said, not impressed.

She may be only fourteen years old, Lucy thought, repelled and amused at the same time, but she sounds as though only the most extreme forms of vice could hold her interest for more than five minutes at a time.

Tony went over to Susan and offered her the telescope. “You want to take a look?”

Susan shrugged again. “I don’t care.” But she took the telescope and put it languidly to her eye.

“You ever look through one of those before?” Tony asked.

“No,” Susan said.

“You can see the mountains of the moon with this one,” said Tony.

Susan looked critically and without favor at the moon.

“How do you like that?” Tony asked, the moon’s proprietor.

“It’s okay,” Susan said, returning the telescope. “It’s the moon.”

Jeff chuckled, shortly, once, and Susan raked him with her policewoman’s eyes. “Well,” she said, “I must be off. My mother will want to know about the bridge.” She raised her hand with terrible grace, as though dispensing a blessing. “Ta,” she said.

“See you tomorrow,” Tony said, and his effort to be nonchalant made Lucy feel she was going to break into a sweat in sympathy.

“Maybe,” Susan said wearily.

Poor Tony, Lucy thought. The first girl he’s ever looked at.

“Delighted to have made your acquaintance, everybody,” Susan said. “Ta, again.”

They watched her walk down the path, her buttocks like two solidly pumped-up beach balls under the tight cloth of the jeans.

Jeff shuddered elaborately as she disappeared around the corner of the house. “I bet her mother is something,” he said. “I’ll give you three guesses why that lady was in Nevada last summer.”

“Don’t gossip,” Lucy said. “Tony, stop lingering.”

Tony slowly came back to the adult world. “She looks funny in pants, doesn’t she? Kind of lumpy.”

“You’ll find they get lumpier and lumpier in pants as you go along, Tony,” Jeff said.

The moment, with its joke about sex, and the memory of the girl’s dry and effortless rejection of her son, made Lucy uncomfortable. Another night, she thought, resenting Jeff, and I would have laughed. Not tonight.

“Tony,” she said, “inside with you. Get into your pajamas. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

Tony slowly started in. “Jeff,” he said, “will you read to me when I get into bed?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll read to you tonight,” Lucy said, almost automatically.

“I like the way Jeff reads better.” Tony stopped at the door. “He skips the descriptions.”

“Jeff’s had a long day,” Lucy said, stubbornly, sorry that she had started this, but committed now. “He probably has a date or something.”

“No,” Jeff began, “I …”

“Anyway, Tony,” Lucy said, in a tone of sharp command she almost never used with him, “go in and get your pajamas on. Quickly.”

“All right,” Tony said, sounding hurt. “I didn’t mean …”

“Go ahead!” Lucy said, almost hysterically.

Puzzled, and a little frightened, Tony went into the house. Lucy moved quickly, in little jerky movements, around the porch, throwing some magazines together, closing the sewing basket, standing the telescope on the chair next to the glider, conscious that Jeff was watching her closely, humming tunelessly to himself.

She stopped in front of him. He was leaning against the porch pillar, his head in darkness, only a faint gleam showing where his eyes were.

“You,” she said. “I don’t like the way you behave with Tony.”

“With Tony?” Jeff straightened up, surprised, and came into the light of the lamp. “Why? I just behave naturally.”