Lucy Crown (34 page)

“Oh, Christ.” Tony put his head in his hands. “Not now.”

Oliver stood over him, wavering a little. “We sacrificed you. I admit it. The reasons looked good at the time. How did we know they wouldn’t hold up? If what you’re looking for is revenge, look at me and you’ve got it.”

“I don’t want anything,” Tony said. “I’m not interested in revenge.”

“Do you mean that?” Oliver asked eagerly.

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Son.” Suddenly Oliver reached over and took Tony’s hand with both of his and shook it crazily. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Is that all you wanted to say?” Tony lifted his head and looked up at his father, standing, half-bent, unsteady and bleary-eyed, above him.

“No, no.” Oliver dropped his hands and spoke hastily, as though he were afraid that if he stopped talking for one moment he would be left alone in the room. “I told you I have something for you.” He went over to the open Valpack and got down, with a thump, on his knees in front of it and began rummaging in the interior. “I’ve been meaning to give this to you for a long time. I was afraid the proper occasion might not come up and … Here it is …” He pulled out a little package wrapped in tissue paper, with a rubber band around it. Still on his knees, he tore clumsily at the paper. He dropped the paper, now in shreds, on the floor and held up an old-fashioned gold watch. “My father’s watch,” he said. “Solid gold. I’ve always carried it for luck, although really I prefer a wristwatch. He gave it to me two weeks before he died. Solid gold,” Oliver said, squinting at it in the lamplight and turning it over slowly and shakily. “An old Waltham. It’s over forty years old, but it keeps perfect time.” He stood up and came back to Tony, still admiring the watch. “You don’t have to wear it, of course, it’s terribly out of date, but you could keep it on your desk, something like that …” He held it out, but Tony didn’t take it.

“Why don’t you hang onto it?” Tony said, with a twinge of superstition. “If it’s brought you luck.”

“Luck.” Oliver grinned painfully. “You keep it for me. Maybe the luck’ll work better that way. Please.”

Tony put his hand out slowly and Oliver dropped the watch into his palm. The watch was surprisingly heavy. It was thick and the gold of the case was elaborately chased and the face was yellowed a little and marked with thin, old-fashioned Roman numerals. Tony looked at it and noticed that it was after eleven. Damn it, he thought, I’m going to miss Elizabeth. She’ll never wait.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll give it to my son, when the time comes.”

Oliver smiled anxiously. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the idea.”

Tony put the watch in his side pocket and stood up. “Well …” he began.

“Don’t go yet,” Oliver said. “Not yet. There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?” Tony tried to keep his impatience with his father, with the evening, with the sad and littered little room, out of his voice.

“Wait. Just wait.” Oliver made a wide, mysterious gesture with his hand and went over to the telephone. He sat down on the bed, still in his cap and trenchcoat, and picked up the phone. He clicked the instrument impatiently. “I want Orange 7654,” he said. “That’s in New Jersey.”

“Whom’re you calling?” Tony asked suspiciously.

“That’s right,” Oliver said, into the phone. “Orange.” He turned to Tony, holding the instrument to his ear. “You knew we moved to New Jersey a few years ago?”

“Yes,” Tony said.

“Of course. You were there. Happy Thanksgiving.” Oliver grinned painfully. “It turned out it wasn’t really practical to live in Hartford any more,” Oliver said. “And in one way, it turned out very well. The plant was obsolete, anyway, and I had a chance to buy in New Jersey and we expanded enormously. The move made a rich man out of me.” He laughed. “The romance of business,” he said vaguely. “I could even afford to be a patriot and join up when my country called. Operator, operator!” he said impatiently into the phone.

“Whom’re you calling?” Tony asked.

“Your mother.” Oliver’s face was tight, almost as though he might cry; although it was probably only the whisky, and his eyes were full of pleading.

“Oh, come on now,” Tony said. “What’s the sense in that?”

“Just once,” Oliver said. “Just this last night. Just for the both of us to say hello to her, together. How much harm can that do—just to say hello?”

Tony hesitated, then he shrugged. “Okay,” he said wearily.

“That’s fine,” Oliver said happily. “That’s a sport.”

That’s a sport, Tony thought. The vocabulary of my father.

“Come over here.” Oliver waved to him vigorously. “You take the phone. You speak to her right off. Come on, come on.”

Tony walked over and took the phone and put it to his head. He heard the regular distant ringing sound in the receiver. His father was standing close to him, liquorish-smelling, breathing fast, as if he had just run a long distance. The phone rang and rang.

“She’s probably asleep,” Oliver said anxiously. “She hasn’t heard it yet.”

Tony didn’t say anything. He listened to the ringing.

“Maybe she’s taking a bath,” Oliver said. “Maybe the water’s running and she can’t hear it …”

“There’s no answer,” Tony said. He started to hang up, but Oliver grabbed the phone from him and put it to his own ear, as though he didn’t trust Tony.

They stood still, the thin, mechanical double sound surprisingly loud in the quiet room.

“I guess she went to a movie,” Oliver said, “or she’s playing bridge. She plays a lot of bridge. Or maybe she had to work late. She works very hard and …”

“Hang up,” Tony said, “she’s not home.”

“Just five more rings,” said Oliver.

They waited for the five more rings, then Oliver hung up. He stood staring at the phone on the shabby bed-table scarred with cigarette burns and the marks of wet glasses.

“Well, isn’t that too bad?” he said, very low, shaking his head, staring at the phone. “Isn’t that just too bad?”

“Good night, Father,” Tony said.

Oliver didn’t move. He stood looking at the phone, his face serious, reflective, not especially sad, but remote and thoughtful.

“I said good night, Father.”

Oliver looked up. “Oh, yes,” he said flatly. He put out his hand and Tony shook it. There was no force in his grip.

“Well …” Tony said uncomfortably, suddenly feeling the weight and embarrassment of saying good-bye to the wrong member of the family who was going to the war. “Good luck.”

“Sure. Sure, Son,” Oliver said. He smiled remotely. “It’s been a nice evening.”

Tony looked hard at him, but his father obviously had nothing further to say. It was as though he had exhausted all his interest in him. Tony crossed to the door and went out, leaving his father standing next to the telephone.

He took a cab down to Number One, hoping that Elizabeth hadn’t gone. She wasn’t at the bar when he went in and he decided to have one drink and wait fifteen minutes and then, if she hadn’t arrived, go home.

He ordered a whisky and idly put his hand in his pocket and felt the watch. He took it out and stared at it. It was like having 1900 in your hand. A fat man was standing in a spotlight next to the piano, singing a song called “I Love Life.”

Tony turned the watch over. It was almost dark at the bar, but if he held the watch down low on the bar a beam of light from a small lamp behind the bottles struck it. The lacily engraved gold gleamed in his hand. There was a little catch on one side of the watch and Tony flicked it and the back snapped open. There was a picture in it and Tony bent over to look at it. It was a photograph of his mother, taken when she was very young. Her hair was in a funny dowdy bun, but it didn’t matter, she was beautiful just the same, staring out of the aging photograph with wide, candid, rather shy and smiling eyes in the slanting, furtive light that the barman used to mix his drinks while the show was on at the piano.

Oh, God, Tony thought, what did he want to do this to me for?

He looked around for a place to throw the photograph, but at that moment he saw Elizabeth making her way among the tables toward the bar. He closed the watch and put it in his pocket, thinking, I’ll do it when I get home.

“Wicked, wicked,” Elizabeth whispered, chuckling, and squeezed his hand. “Is Papa safely in bed?”

“Yes,” Tony said. “Safe and sound.”

19

T
HE ROAD SPED SMOOTHLY
under the tires, the car passing through flickering bands of shade thrown by the rows of trees on each side, the kilometer stones, with the Norman names, going past with streaming regularity. Tony sat straight at the wheel, driving automatically, remembering the night in New York, realizing that for many years he had tried, with a conscious effort, to forget it.

The last time you see your father before he dies, he thought, you should know it, there should be a sign, a warning, a
Nevermore,
so that you can say an appropriate word, so that you do not hurry from a bare hotel room, worrying that you are late for a rendezvous at a bar with a girl who has come to the city, at the age of eighteen, to enjoy a war.

He was conscious of his mother seated beside him, her eyes closed, the wind picking at the loose ends of her scarf. What would it have been like, he wondered, how would everything have been changed if she had been home that night, if she had come to the telephone and he had heard her voice after Oliver had said, “That’s fine. That’s a sport”?

Sitting in the cramped little seat, half-dozing, with the wind in her ears, rushing toward the grave she had never seen and whose meaning she still did not truly understand, Lucy was thinking, too, of the last time she had seen Oliver. It had been nearly three o’clock in the morning and she knew that Oliver had seen Tony earlier and that he had tried to call her, because he told her later, in the cold, empty, echoing house in New Jersey, after she had come in, weary and unsatisfied, turning the young soldier away from the door …

“No,” she said to the lieutenant, barring the way, not turning the key in the lock, “you can’t come in. It’s too late. And don’t send the taxi away. Go home, like a good boy. Tomorrow’s another day.”

“I love you,” the boy said.

Oh, God, she thought. He means it, too. It’s the war. A couple of sad, clutching hours in a shabby roadhouse room, to console the wounded, and they say I love you. Why do I do it? she thought, exhausted, remembering that she had to be in the laboratory at nine in the morning. I must have pity on myself, too.

“Don’t talk like that,” she said.

“Why not?” The boy put his arms around her and tried to kiss her.

“Because it makes everything too complicated.”

She let him kiss her briefly. Then she pushed him away.

“Tomorrow night?” he said.

“Call me in the afternoon,” she said.

“I’m being shipped out in three more days,” he said, pleading. “Please …”

“All right,” she said.

“It was wonderful,” he whispered.

Payment, she thought wryly. A polite well-brought-up boy, who has carried his manners over with him into the war.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come in?”

She laughed and waved him off and he smiled sadly and went down the steps toward where the taxi was waiting, with its motor going and its lights on, at the curb. He looked sorrowful and lonely and rather frail, even in his officer’s overcoat, and too young and polite for what was ahead of him. Watching him, Lucy felt confused, uncertain about the value of what she had done that night, and which until that moment she had thought was an act of generosity and pity. Maybe, she thought, it will only make him sadder in the long run.

The taxi drove off. She shrugged and unlocked the door and went into the house.

She put on the light in the hall and started toward the steps, in a hurry to get to bed. Then she stopped and sniffed. There was a strong smell of cigarette smoke, coming from the living room. I must talk to the cleaning woman, she thought, irritated, about smoking while she works. Then she remembered that the cleaning woman only came in twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and this was not a Monday or Thursday.

Lucy hesitated. Then she went into the living room. From the doorway, in the dark, she saw the glow of a cigarette and the shadowy bulk of someone sitting in a chair that had been pulled into the center of the carpet. She turned on the light.

Oliver was sitting there, with his coat on, smoking, hunched deep in the chair, facing her. She hadn’t seen him in five months and she noticed that he was thinner than the last time and that he seemed much older. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, and his mouth was twisted with fatigue.

“Oliver,” she said.

“Hello, Lucy.” He didn’t stand up. His head rolled a little and he licked his lips and she realized that he had been drinking.

“Have you been here long?” she asked. She took off her coat and threw it on a chair. She felt uncomfortable and a little afraid. It wasn’t like him to arrive unannounced or to drink too much, or to sit like that, in his coat, brooding and obscurely threatening, in the dark, in the chair that seemed to have been deliberately aimed at the doorway.

“A couple of hours,” he said. “I don’t know.” He spoke slowly, his voice a little thick and deliberate. “I called from New York but you weren’t home.”

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “A drink? A sandwich?”

“I don’t want anything,” he said.

“Are you on leave?” she asked. “How much time do you have?”

“I’m shipping out tomorrow,” he said. “Overseas.”

“Oh,” she said. Everybody is shipping out this week, she thought. The entire Army. If I weren’t so tired, she thought, I would undoubtedly feel something else besides this.

She shivered a little. “It’s cold in here,” she said. “You should’ve turned the heat up.”

“I didn’t notice,” he said.

She went over to the thermostat on the wall and turned it up, to the point at which it said, 80 degrees, Summer Heat. She didn’t do it because she expected the heat to come up fast enough to do any good, but to keep herself busy, to avoid the direct, examining stare of her husband.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I think I’ll go see what’s in the icebox. You sure I can’t bring you something?”