Lucy Crown (19 page)

“I suppose so,” Oliver said. “Yes, of course.”

“Well, the only way I know how to help,” Patterson said, “is to try to figure out why she finally did something like this.”

“I know why,” Oliver said angrily. “She’s a …” He stopped and shook his head. Then he sighed. “No, she’s not at all. Go on. I’ll keep quiet.”

“You made all the decisions,” Patterson said. “You took her away from her work …”

“Her work.” Oliver made a contemptuous sound. “Messing around in a smelly laboratory for an old idiot by the name of Stubbs. You ever hear of him?”

“No.”

“Neither has anyone else. If she worked with him for twenty years, maybe they’d have produced one paper, proving that algae were green.”

Patterson chuckled.

“You laugh,” Oliver said. “But it’s true. What the hell, it wasn’t like tearing Galileo away from his telescope. The human race was going to survive just the same, whether or not she went into that laboratory five mornings a week. She wasn’t so different from all the other girls. She fiddled around, pretending to have a career, waiting to get married. The cities’re full of them.”

“That’s another thing,” Patterson said. “I talked to her. She hated leaving New York.”

“If every woman who couldn’t live in New York felt she had to betray her husband in consequence …” Oliver began. He shook his head angrily and drained the last of the wine from his glass. “And what about me?” he asked. “Do you think I wanted to come here to live?” he asked. “Do you think I wanted to be saddled with the printing business? That was the meanest day of my life, when I came up here after my father died and looked at the books and saw that the whole thing was going to collapse if I didn’t take hold. For ten years,” he said, “every time I’ve gone through the gate of the plant, I’ve felt myself growing rigid with boredom. But I haven’t taken it out on my wife …”

“The difference is,” Patterson said gently, “that you made the decision. And she had to follow.”

“God, it was over ten years ago!”

“You can build up a good case of regret in ten years,” Patterson said. “You can get to feel real useless in ten years.”

“Useless!” Oliver was making little balls of bread crumbs and flicking them brusquely against the wine bottle. “She had the boy to take care of, the house …”

“Would you be satisfied just taking care of a little boy and a house all your life?” Patterson asked.

“I’m not a woman.”

Patterson grinned.

“What is a man supposed to do?” Oliver asked. “Set up a Female WPA? Interesting projects,” he said sardonically, “for women who have nothing to do between three and five in the afternoon.” He looked at Patterson suspiciously. “How do you know so much?” he asked. “Has she been filling your ear?”

“No,” Patterson said. “She didn’t have to.”

“What about your own wife?” Oliver said, attacking. “What about Catherine?”

Patterson hesitated. “Catherine is a lost, placid soul,” he said. “She gave up hope when she was nineteen.” He shrugged. “Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe I don’t know her at all. Maybe she’s writing pornographic novels in the attic. Maybe she has a string of lovers from here to Long Island Sound. We don’t communicate enough for me to find out. It’s a different kind of marriage,” he explained regretfully, concealing his envy of his friend. “There’s nothing she or I could do that could possibly make either of us angry.” He smiled crookedly. “Or even mildly disturbed.”

“Why’ve you kept it up so long, then?” Oliver demanded. “Why didn’t you quit?”

Patterson shrugged again. “It hardly seemed worth the trouble,” he said, almost truthfully.

“Good God,” Oliver said. “Marriage.”

They sat in silence for a moment, gloomily, two men fixed in contemplation of complexity, waste, cross-purposes. Patterson allowed his mind to wander away from Oliver, and he remembered some of the other problems that he had been confronted with just that day, in the ordinary course of his work, in his own office. Mrs. Sayers, who was only thirty-three years old, but who had five children, and who was suffering stubbornly from anemia and who was tired all the time; so tired, she said, that when she had to get up at six-thirty every morning, to prepare breakfast and take care of the kids, it was like climbing up on the cross, she said, and she meant it. And nothing, as far as Patterson could see, to be done about it. And Mr. Lindsay, who was a machinist, and whose hands were so crippled with arthritis that he could barely hold his tools, and the effort of trying to hide it from the foreman so great that the sweat broke out on his face from the minute he entered the shop until long after he got home at night. And nothing to be done about it. And the woman who had come into his office three months’ pregnant, only her husband had been in Panama for six months. All the routine, random misery, and ailments that the human race casually pushed across a doctor’s desk every day of the week. And a step removed from that—the newspaper tragedies—the men who were going into battle in Spain, and who would be dead or broken by tomorrow evening, and the people being hunted down and destroyed all over Europe …

By any objective scale, Patterson thought, Oliver’s pain must be minute and inconsiderable. Only no man calculated his agony against an objective scale, and a thousand deaths on another continent finally were likely to weigh less in a man’s private balance than his own toothache.

No, Patterson corrected himself, it’s not fair. There was also the question of tolerance of injury to be considered. The threshold of pain varied enormously—one man might suffer an amputation with nothing more than a stoical grunt, while another might go into shock with a crushed finger. Perhaps Oliver was a man with a low threshold of pain when the injury was infidelity.

“Self-expression,” Oliver was saying thoughtfully, staring down at his hands spread out on the tablecloth.

“What?” Patterson asked, forgetting for a moment.

“Your theory,” Oliver said.

“Oh, yes,” Patterson said, smiling. “Of course, you must remember it’s just a theory and I haven’t kept any scientific checks …”

“Go on,” Oliver said.

“Well, with a man like you,” Patterson said, “who insists upon making all the decisions at all times, for everybody …”

“It’s not because I want to,” Oliver protested. I’d be delighted if other people would take the responsibility. But people just diddle around …”

Patterson grinned. “Exactly. Well, after a few years like that, it seems to me that a woman’d begin to feel that the thing she wanted most, the thing she just had to do—would be to make one big important decision by herself. And you’d closed all the other fields to her—you told her where she was to live and how she was to live and how she was to bring up her son—By God, I remember now, you even told her what the menus should be for dinner.”

“I have special tastes in food,” Oliver said defensively. “I don’t see why I can’t eat what I want in my own house.”

Patterson laughed, and a second later, Oliver laughed, too. “Hell,” he said, “I must have some reputation around this town.”

“Well, it is true, you’re considered a man who knows his own mind, Oliver.”

“If she had so many objections,” Oliver said, “why didn’t she speak up? Nobody’s under a vow of silence in our house.”

“Maybe she was afraid to. Or maybe she didn’t know she had: the objections until this summer.”

“Until a twenty-year-old boy came along,” Oliver said sullenly, “who doesn’t have to shave more than twice a week and who hasn’t got anything better to do than lounge around a lake all summer, playing with married women.”

“Maybe,” Patterson said astringently.

“At least,” Oliver said, “if it was a grand passion—if she was in love with him, if she was ready to make some sacrifices for him! But he told me himself—she laughed at him when he asked her to marry him! It’s so damn frivolous!”

“I can’t help you there,” Patterson said. “And I think, in the long run, you’re going to be glad it was frivolous.”

Oliver tapped the table impatiently. “And then, to top it all,” he said, “she had to be so inept. Letting the boy see her.”

“Oh,” Patterson said, “children see worse things than that. They see their parents being cowardly, or cruel, or crooked …”

“It’s easy for you to talk,” Oliver said. “You don’t have a son.”

“Send him away to school for a couple of years,” Patterson said, ignoring what Oliver had just said, “and he’ll forget it. Children forget everything.”

“You think so?”

“Sure,” said Patterson, being glib.

“I’ll have a lot of things to forget, too.” Oliver sighed.

“Grownups forget everything, too,” Patterson said.

“You know you’re a liar,” said Oliver.

Patterson smiled. “Yes.”

“Then what’re you talking like that for?”

“Because I’m your friend,” Patterson said soberly, “and I know you want to take her back, and I want to give you all the reasons why you should, even if they’re lousy reasons.”

“Some day,” Oliver said sarcastically, “when you’re in trouble, make sure to come to me for advice.”

“I’ll do that,” Patterson said.

“So—what do you think I ought to do?” Oliver asked. “Practically?”

“Go up there tomorrow and be noble,” Patterson said promptly. “Forgive her. Take her to your bosom. Tell her you know she’ll be a paragon amongst wives from now on. Tell her you’ll let her arrange her own menus from now on …”

“Leave out the jokes,” Oliver said.

“Don’t send her off in the summer by herself any more.”

“She didn’t want to stay up there,” Oliver remembered. “She begged me to take her back with me. If I let her, she’d hang around my neck twenty-four hours a day.”

“There you are,” Patterson said.

“It’s so damned complicated. And what can I tell Tony?”

“Tell him it was an accident,” said Patterson. “A grown-up accident, that he’s too young at the moment to understand. Tell him you’ll explain everything when he’s twenty-one years old. Tell him to be a good boy at school and stop looking through windows.”

“He’s going to hate us,” Oliver said, peering down into his cup. “He’s going to wind up hating both of us.”

There was nothing to be said to this and Patterson didn’t try. They sat in silence for a moment, then Oliver called for the check. “This is on me,” he said, when Patterson tried to take it. “Payment for professional services.”

On the way out of the hotel, Oliver sent a telegram to Lucy, telling her to pack and be ready, he was coming up to get her the next afternoon.

13

“A
RRIVING AROUND THREE O’CLOCK
, tomorrow,” the telegram had read. “Please have everything packed and be ready to leave immediately. Wish to make as much of the trip in daylight as possible. Oliver.”

Lucy had re-read the telegram a half dozen times. She had been tempted to telephone Oliver, but had decided against it. Let him come, she had thought. Let it be settled, once and for all.

After the night of Oliver’s visit, Lucy had stayed in the cottage, numbly forcing herself to go through the routine of holiday with Tony, waiting, in the beginning, for something to happen, some message, some event which would push her one way or another, bring the season to a climax, disastrous, or violent if need be, but punctuating her life, finishing one section, marking the beginning of another.

But nothing had happened. Oliver had not called or written; Jeff had disappeared; the days wore on, sunny, long, ordinary. She went in to meals with Tony, she worked with him on his eye exercises, she went swimming with him, read to him, feeling that everything she did was unreal, that what she was doing she was not doing because it was useful, but because it was habit, like a ruined man going daily to his office to work over accounts that had long been closed merely because he had grown accustomed to it through the years and there was nothing else he could think of to do with his time.

She watched Tony greedily, but every day, under the cloak of custom and familiarity, she had the feeling that he was becoming more and more unknown to her. If, suddenly, he had leaped up and denounced her in the dining room, if she had awakened and found him standing over her bed with a knife in his hand, if he had disappeared forever into the forest, she would have had to say to herself, “Of course, I expected something like that.”

He was polite, obedient, ungiving, and with the passage of each day she felt the strain becoming greater. It was as though, each night, when she put the light out in his room, and said, “Good night, Tony,” somebody, somewhere, was turning a ratchet to which her life was attached and pulling her one notch tighter.

Ten days passed; the guests departed from the hotel, the nights turned chilly, the members of the band packed their instruments and returned to the city. Tony seemed neither happy nor unhappy. He held the door open for her politely when they went in to dinner, he came immediately out of the water when she called to him, “You’re getting cold, you’d better dry yourself now,” he asked no questions, volunteered nothing.

When she caught him watching her, his eyes seemed to her the eyes of a grown man, stubborn, unrelenting, accusing. By the end of the ten days she found that it was only by a painful act of memory that she could remember what he had seemed like earlier in the summer. And it was almost impossible to believe that so short a time ago she had considered him a little boy, loving, childish and easy to handle. Now, when they sat together on the lawn, in a stiff, artificial representation of a mother with her son on holiday, she felt herself rattled and clumsy, resenting him more and more each day, like two strangers, shipwrecked, floating across the ocean on a raft, begrudging each other the daily swallow of water from the canteen, suspicious of each movement. Soon his remoteness seemed to her to be open malevolence, his cold politeness an unhealthy and precocious vengeance on her. Finally, she thought, What right has he to sit there judging me like that? Unreasonably accepting him not as a child, but as a mature and implacable opponent, she thought, In the long run, what have I done to
him?

And mixed with it all, there was a growing resentment of Oliver, too, for leaving her there alone with Tony for ten days, each of them using the other, she felt, to punish her.