Lucy Crown

15

“WELL, MR. CROWN,” the headmaster was saying, “as in most cases of boys his age, there’s a little of everything to report.” The headmaster raised the bottle of sherry inquiringly, but Oliver shook his head. When Oliver had been in school he was sure that his headmaster had not offered sherry to the fathers of the pupils before lunch. Oliver realized that this was a sign that education had become more relaxed since he was a boy, but he also realized that if he accepted a second glass, a minute demerit would be entered, at the back of the headmaster’s mind, against the Crown family.

The headmaster put the bottle down ceremonially. His name was Hollis, he was surprisingly young, and he moved delicately in the cheerful library-like room which served as his office, as though to reassure the parents of the boys entrusted to his care that the developing souls would not be harmed by any sudden or uncalculated movement on his part.

“What I mean,” Hollis went on, smiling boyishly, expertly taking the sting out of judgment, “is that he has his problems, even as you and I did at his age, I’m sure.”

“When I was his age,” Oliver said, purposely frivolous, to keep from being lectured, “my one problem was that I could only chin forty-three times. I’d set my heart on fifty, by my sixteenth birthday.”

Hollis smiled dutifully, accustomed to many generations of fathers. “Of course,” he said, “the physical thing cannot be altogether discounted. Because he can’t join in all the games with the other boys, the team games—although I do hear he plays rather good tennis—it’s possible that his—uh—leaning toward solitude, toward going-it-alone, has been somewhat accentuated. Although the school doctor is quite satisfied with his physical condition—we give him very careful over-all examinations once a month, you know. In fact, the doctor has privately expressed the opinion to me that Tony, if he wished, could indulge in a great deal more group activity than he actually does.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like the group,” Oliver said. “Maybe if the group was different, he’d plunge in up to his neck.”

“Perhaps,” Hollis said. The tone was mollifying and polite, but there was a chilly blink of the eyelids over the candid, clever blue eyes. “Although we do have a fine group of boys here, if I say so myself. Most representative.”

“I’m sorry,” Oliver said, knowing that he had been too brusque to this harmless, conscientious man only because it was impossible to explain anything to him. “I’m sure it’s Tony’s fault.”

“Well”—Hollis spread his hands forgivingly—“fault is a harsh word. Taste, perhaps. No doubt he’ll change as he gets older. Though, as the twig is bent …” He shrugged and smiled at the same time, administering a warning and a caress at the same moment. “He does particularly well at one thing,” Hollis went on, happy to be able to uncover treasure. “He does the cleverest cartoons for the school paper. We haven’t had a boy as gifted as that in many years. They’re surprisingly mature. Rather acid, I must say …” Again the soft apologetic smile, to put the gloss of manners on the necessary and rather unpleasant truth. “I, myself, have heard some grumblings in certain quarters about the sharpness of some of his caricatures. But, of course, he must have sent them to you, you’ve seen them yourself …”

“No,” Oliver said. “I haven’t seen them. I didn’t know he did them.”

“Ah.” Hollis regarded Oliver curiously. “Really?” He bent his head and shuffled through some papers on his desk, then spoke more quickly, tactfully getting away from the subject. “He does fairly well in biology and chemistry. Which is all to the good, of course, since he means to take a pre-medical course. He’s—uh—negligent, I’m afraid, in most of the other subjects, although I’m told he does a great deal of reading on his own. Unfortunately,” again the understanding, practiced, headmaster’s grimace, “almost none of the reading has anything at all to do with his class work. And if he wants to get into a good college in two more years …” Hollis left the sentence hanging, mildly and ominously threatening, like the first delicate puff of wind on a still, dark day.

“I’ll talk to him,” Oliver said. He stood up. “Thank you very much.”

Hollis stood up, too, framed against the window, behind which, in the distance, the gray Gothic buildings of the campus glittered dully in the autumn sun. He held out his hand, a spry, intelligent young man in a soft blue shirt, knowingly representing solid, gray-stone tradition, discreetly tempered by progress. The two men shook hands and Hollis said, “I suppose you’ve come up to take Tony back to Hartford with you for the holiday?”

“We don’t live in Hartford,” Oliver said.

“Ah?” Hollis said. “I thought I remembered …”

“We moved almost a year ago,” Oliver said. “We live in New Jersey now. In Orange. I had a chance to sell my plant in Hartford and buy a larger and more up-to-date one in New Jersey,” he explained, giving all the false reasons.

“Do you like New Jersey better?” Hollis inquired politely.

“Much,” Oliver said. He did not explain that he would have liked any place in the world better than Hartford, any place to which he and Lucy came as strangers, any place in which they had no friends to ask curious questions about Tony and to fall into strained silence whenever the subject of children came up in conversation. He did not explain, either, that for the last six months of their stay in Hartford, Lucy had refused to see any of their old friends, with the exception of Sam Patterson. Sam Patterson knew most of what there was to be known, and there was no need to lie to him. With all the others, the weight of speculation had finally been too much to bear. “It’s no good any more,” Lucy had said. “After an evening with them, I feel as though I’ve been with a group of cryptographers who’ve been working with all their might to crack a code. And the code is me. I’ve had enough of it. If you want to see them, you go yourself. I’m through.”

“Well,” Hollis was saying, “Orange isn’t so far. Are you driving Tony home today?”

“No,” Oliver said. “This Thanksgiving my wife and I’re going down to South Carolina. It’s my one chance to play some golf before the winter sets in. I just came up to have lunch with Tony.”

“Oh.” A noncommittal blink of academic eyes. “I’ll arrange to have Tony in to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll tell Mrs. Hollis.”

“Thanks,” Oliver said. “Will there be many boys here?”

“A few,” Hollis said. “We have a boy whose parents are in India, and there are always one or two from—uh—broken families …” He ducked his head deprecatingly, smiling, deploring and forgiving the ways of the modern world. “Though most of the boys who live too far away, or who don’t go home for one reason or another, usually are invited by friends.” He paused, dutifully, permitting a parent to understand that his son was not the sort of boy who was invited by friends. “Don’t worry,” he said heartily. “Tony will be well fed.”

He escorted Oliver to the outside door, and stood there, in the cold-autumn wind, his bright necktie blowing, watching Oliver get into his car and start off toward the hotel where he was to meet Tony.

Oliver went to the bar of the hotel to wait for Tony. He ordered a whisky to take the taste of the academic sherry out of his mouth, and thought over what the headmaster had said, the gentle warnings, the unfavorable judgments, the delicate avoidance of comment on the fact that Tony’s mother, in all the two years that the boy had been at the school, had never put in an appearance. Well, that was one of the things a teacher was for—to show you your son in the light that others saw him, to prepare you for what he was probably going to be like as a man. Staring somberly into his whisky glass, Oliver realized that, as kindly as possible, the headmaster had been trying to tell him that he foresaw Tony as a lonely and unpopular man, with no great taste or aptitude for work, and an unpleasantly sharp and mocking attitude toward the people around him. Oliver sipped his whisky, resenting the headmaster and his confidence in his own judgment and his sense of prophecy. All these people, Oliver thought defensively, are wrong most of the time. That’s why they became teachers in the first place. When he had been Tony’s age, his own teachers, he knew, had predicted vague but glittering glories for him. He had been a tall, handsome, easygoing boy who hardly had to study at all to get the highest marks in his class, who had been a leader in all games, a captain of teams, a president of clubs and classes, a precocious and graceful squire of young ladies. Well, Oliver thought grimly, hunched over his glass, they ought to come and take a look at me now.

Thinking again of Hollis, he wondered what made him so confident of himself. Having a small, definite, achievable aim, and achieving it early? Being surrounded by the gray, unchallenging, semi-failures who made up the faculties of small, country schools? Dictating, with affable severity, to hundreds of boys who passed out of his life before they became old enough seriously to oppose him, and whose later estimates of him would never come back to him? Living always by a comfortable curriculum that hardly changed from one year to the next—so many hours for Latin, so many for sport, so many for the neat, adolescent adoration of God and the laying down of proper, devout rules? Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father, thou shalt learn to recognize the ablative absolute, thou shalt not cheat on examinations, thou shalt prepare thyself for Harvard. And, along with all these solid foundations and secure passageways, having a pretty, buxom young wife who had come to him with a little money of her own, and who saw him always in a position of command, and who, because of his job, worked with him daily, almost hourly, so that each year their interdependence became cozier and more useful and intimate. Maybe the next time Oliver went into that cheerful office and shook that hearty hand, he would murmur, delphically, “Remember Leontes …”

All goes well, Teacher? Oliver thought, grinning at his own vulgarity. Try sending your wife to the mountains for a summer.

He was about to order another whisky when through the open doorway of the bar, he saw Tony coming into the lobby of the hotel.

Tony hadn’t seen his father and Oliver watched him for a few seconds, as Tony peered, a little near-sightedly, through his glasses, around the hotel lobby. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat and his tweed jacket was too short in the sleeves for him and he was carrying, rather clumsily, a large square of drawing board under one arm. He was taller than Oliver remembered, although he had seen him only six weeks before, and he looked thin and undernourished and cold from the sharp November wind. His hair was long and fine, in contrast to all the other close-cropped students whom Oliver had passed on the campus, and he seemed to hold himself nervously and challengingly. He had a big head, too large for his thin shoulders, and his features had fined down and his nose seemed too long for the rest of his face and to Oliver he seemed to have the air of some queer, half-timid, half-dangerous bird, solitary, ruffled, uncertain whether to fly or attack.

Looking at his son, Oliver had a strange double image. In the long nose and the fair hair and the large gray eyes, even behind the glasses, he could see Lucy’s inheritance, and the broad, slightly domed forehead and the big, firm mouth made him remember, confusedly, photographs of himself when he was in school. But none of it seemed to hang together. The air of challenge, the feeling of suspicion, almost, that Tony brought with him, seemed to keep the elements of his face and body from fusing.

Then Tony saw him, and waved, and came into the bar, and when he was up close and shaking Oliver’s hand, familiarity wiped out the fragmentary impressions, and it was just Tony, grave, polite, well known.

They went into lunch and after the first ten minutes in which they discussed what they wanted to have and Oliver asked the usual questions about how Tony felt and how things were going in class and if he needed anything, and Tony gave the usual answers, the periods of silence grew, as usual, longer and longer and harder for each of them to bear. Oliver was sure that if he never came to see Tony, both he and Tony would be happier for it. But that was out of the question, although it would be hard to say why.

Observing Tony across the table, Oliver noted that the boy ate politely, spilled nothing, moved his hands deftly and with precision. He kept his eyes down, and only once or twice during the meal, when Oliver for the moment had looked away and then suddenly turned back, did he catch Tony watching him, thoughtfully, without malice or love. When Tony caught Oliver’s glance, he lowered his eyes, without haste, and continued eating, calmly and silently. It was only when they were eating dessert that Oliver suddenly realized that there had been something about the boy’s appearance that had been bothering him ever since they had shaken hands. A heavy, long, blond fuzz had come out on Tony’s upper lip and chin and there were isolated tufts of fine, curly hair along his jaws. It gave him a shaggy and unkempt look, like a puppy that has walked through a puddle.

Oliver didn’t say anything about it for a while, but he kept staring at the uneven, fine beard on his son’s face. Of course, he thought. He’s almost sixteen.

“Mr. Hollis,” Oliver said, “told me that he was going to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner at his house tomorrow.”

Tony nodded, without pleasure. “If I have time,” he said, “I’ll go.”

“He’s a pretty good fellow, Mr. Hollis,” Oliver said heartily, glad of a subject for conversation, avoiding, with a twinge of guilt, asking what other plans Tony might have for the holiday. “He’s been watching you pretty closely. He says you have a lot of talent. The cartoons, I mean, for the paper …”

“I draw most of them in his class,” Tony said, neatly spooning up his chocolate ice cream. “It keeps me from falling asleep.”

“What does he teach?” Oliver asked, avoiding a more searching question about Tony’s estimate of Mr. Hollis.

“European history. He’s crazy about. Napoleon. He’s only five feet four inches tall, so he’s crazy about Napoleon.”

Was I that mean, Oliver thought, was I that observant, when I was fifteen years old?

“I’d like to see some of the drawings,” he said. “If you happen to have any around.”

“They’re nothing.” Tony spooned away at his ice cream. “If anybody with any real talent came into this school, they’d never even look at mine.”

One thing this boy really can do, Oliver thought ruefully, is choke off conversation. He glanced around the room, to avoid looking at his son’s burgeoning beard, which, unaccountably, was beginning to get on his nerves. There were several boys eating with their parents at other tables, and directly across from the table at which Oliver and Tony were sitting, there was a handsome blond woman who didn’t look more than thirty-five, and who had gold bracelets on both sleeves that sounded all over the room when she moved her hands. She was sitting across from a tall, heavy-boned boy, who was obviously her son, with the same straight nose, the same direct, happy look of carefully tended health. The son had bright blond hair, cut very close, and his well-shaped head rose on a powerful, thick neck from a fullback’s broad shoulders. Oliver noticed that he was very polite with his mother, smiling often and listening eagerly, quick at passing the butter and pouring water, holding her hand unselfconsciously on top of the tablecloth as their voices mingled in quiet, friendly murmurs. American youth, Oliver thought, advertisement.

He became acutely conscious of the impression that he and Tony must give in contrast. Tony, with his long, unfashionable hair, his thin shoulders, his glasses, his fragile neck, and the puppy hair on his chin and jaws. And he himself stiff and obviously ill-at-ease, trying, as must be plain to all the room, to strike up a conversation with his taciturn and unfriendly son. As he stared across at the mother and son at the other side of the room, the woman saw him, and smiled warmly, in parental convention, at him. She had shining, even white teeth, and when she smiled she looked much less than thirty-five. Oliver smiled back and nodded. He nodded again when the boy, following his mother’s silent greeting, saw Oliver, and gravely stood up and made a little, reserved, respectful bow.

“Who’s that?” Oliver asked curiously.

Tony glanced at the other table. “Saunders,” he said, “and his mother. He’s captain of the ice-hockey team, but he’s yellow.”

“Why do you say that?” Oliver felt that he had to protest, although he wasn’t quite sure whether he was protesting on the part of the boy or on the part of the mother.

“I’ve seen him,” Tony said. “He’s yellow. Everybody knows it. He’s the richest boy in school, though.”

“Oh, is he?” Oliver glanced once more at the couple at the table, noticing more carefully the golden arms. “What does his father do?”

“Chases chorus girls,” Tony said.

“Tony!”

“Everybody knows it.” Tony methodically cleaned off the plate of ice cream. “His father isn’t so rich. It isn’t that. Saunders makes the money himself.”

“Oh, does he?” Oliver regarded the large handsome boy with new respect. “How?”

“He lends money at interest,” Tony said. “And he has a copy of the last chapter of Ulysses and he rents it out for a dollar a night. He’s the president of the sixth form.”

Oliver was silent for a moment. Confusedly, he remembered reading Alice in Wonderland and Just So Stories to Tony when he was six years old. A chapter a night. After Tony had his bath and his supper and was in his slippers and bathrobe, ready for bed, smelling of soap, sitting on the edge of the armchair, his feet on Oliver’s knees, so that he could see the illustrations in the lamplight.

“What do you mean, the last chapter?” Oliver asked, certain that there was some childish misunderstanding or desire to shock here.

“You know,” Tony said patiently, “Mrs. Bloom in bed, and the tenor and the soldier in Gibraltar. Yes, yes, yes. All that stuff.”

“Have you read it?”

“Of course,” Tony said. “It’s worth a buck.”

“This is a hell of a school,” Oliver said, forgetting, for the first time during the meal, the constraint that had made conversation so difficult for him. “I think maybe I’d better let Mr. Hollis know about this.”

“What’s the difference?” Tony shrugged. “Everybody in the whole school’s read it by now.”

Oliver stared, baffled, at his son, sitting two feet away from him, shaggy, with the pimples and fuzz of puberty on his face, and a cold, unafraid, measuring light in his eye, removed, mysterious, unpunishable.

“Well,” Oliver said, more loudly than was necessary, “one thing we’re going to do before we leave here is shave that damned beard off your face.”

When they left the dining room, Mrs. Saunders smiled again, radiantly, shaking her golden bracelets. Saunders, immense, smooth-cheeked, bull-necked, smiling with the gravity of a young senator, stood up and made his mannerly, serious bow.

They walked to a drugstore and Oliver bought a heavy gold-plated safety razor, the most expensive one in the shop, and some shaving soap. Tony watched him impassively, asking no questions, standing there with the clumsy piece of drawing board under his arm, glancing from time to time at the covers of the magazines that were displayed near the soda fountain. Then they went to Tony’s room, walking side by side, as other fathers and sons were doing, across the dying grass of the campus, cold and wet through the thin soles of Oliver’s city shoes. Some of the fathers lifted their hats in salute and Oliver did the same, but he noticed that the greetings between Tony and the other boys, with or without their parents, were always curt and unenthusiastic. Oh, God, Oliver thought, as he followed Tony’s narrow back up the stairs of his house, what have I got here?

Tony had a room of his own, a somber cubicle with greenish walls, one window, a narrow bed, a small desk, and a battered wooden cupboard. It was severely neat. There was an open wooden box on the desk, with a stack of papers, evenly clipped together, in it, and the books on the desk were lined up in an orderly row by two granite bookends. The bed didn’t have a wrinkle on it and no clothing was hanging in sight anywhere in the room. Automatically Oliver thought, I ought to send Lucy here to take lessons in housekeeping.

On the wall above the bed was a large map of the world, with little colored pins stuck into it, here and there. And hanging from a string from the ceiling, in front of the cupboard, was a yellowed human skeleton, wired together, with several important bones missing. On the desk was Tony’s telescope.

This was the first time that Oliver had been in Tony’s room, and he blinked, taken aback, at the skeleton. But he didn’t speak about it for the moment, telling himself, with nervous reassurance, that it probably showed commendable zeal in a boy who was preparing for the study of medicine.

“I thought everybody here shared a room with another boy,” he said, unwrapping the razor and slipping in a blade.

“That’s the idea.” Tony was standing in the middle of the room, staring reflectively at the map on the wall. “I had a room-mate, but my cough drove him out.”

“Your cough?” Oliver asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know you had a cough.”

“I don’t.” Tony grinned. “But he was a nuisance and I wanted to be alone. So I used to wake up every night at two o’clock and cough for an hour. He lasted just over a month.”

Oh, Lord, Oliver thought despairingly, Hollis is earning his money keeping him in school. “Take off your shirt, so you won’t get wet,” he said, opening the tube of shaving cream.

Without taking his eyes from the map, Tony began slowly to unbutton his shirt. Oliver looked more closely at the map. There was a pin stuck in the city of Paris, and a pin stuck in Singapore and pins in Jerusalem, Assisi, Constantinople, Calcutta, Avignon, Beirut.

“What’re those pins for?” he asked curiously.

“I’m going to live in each of those places three months,” Tony said matter-of-factly, “after I get out of medical school. I’m going to be a ship’s doctor for ten years.” He took off his shirt and went over to the cupboard and opened the door, making the skeleton swing out into the room, with a dry, unpleasant clatter of loose bones. Tony hung his shirt neatly on a hook and closed the cupboard door.

Ship’s doctor, Oliver thought. What an ambition! He kept his eyes off Tony and stared at the map. Paris, Calcutta, Beirut. Distance, he thought.

“And where’d you get the skeleton?” Oliver asked.

“In a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue,” Tony said. “In New York.”

“Do they let you go to New York by yourself?” Oliver asked, beginning to feel that it was hopeless to try to keep up with the plans and movements of his son.

“No,” Tony said, thoughtfully touching the skeleton. “I tell them I’m going home for the week-end.”

“Oh,” Oliver said lamely. “I see.” For a moment, he had a vision of his wife and his son, unknown to him, unknown to each other, standing on opposite corners of the same avenue, waiting for the lights to change, crossing, in the crowds, close enough to touch, never touching. With a sense of revulsion, he watched Tony, naked from the waist up, thoughtfully fingering the skeleton. “How much did that cost?” he asked.

“Eighty bucks.”

“What?” Oliver couldn’t stifle the tone of surprise. “Where’d you get that much money?”

“I won it at bridge,” Tony said calmly. “We have a regular game. I win three out of four times.”

“Does Mr. Hollis know about this?”

Tony laughed coldly. “He doesn’t know about anything.” He raised his arm and touched the base of the skeleton’s skull. “The occipital bone,” he said. “I know the names of all the bones.”

A more normal father, Oliver thought, with a more normal son, would praise him for such proof of industry. But the sight of the bare, smooth adolescent torso, vulnerable, slender, balanced and neatly shaped, next to the yellowed sticks of the pawnshop skeleton was suddenly unbearable to Oliver.

“Come over here,” he said brusquely, going to the basin in the corner of the room, “and let’s get this over with. I have to be in New York by six o’clock.”

Tony gave the skeleton one last, affectionate pat, which started once more the dicelike clacking of the bones. Then,, obediently, he walked toward the basin and stood in front of Oliver.

“First, wash your face,” Oliver said.

Tony took off his glasses and turned the water on and washed his face. He did it thoroughly, meticulously. Then he dried his hands and turned toward Oliver, the fuzz on his cheeks darkened and flattened by the water.

Oliver rubbed the shaving cream carefully onto Tony’s face, feeling the sharpness and delicacy of the cheekbones under his fingertips. Tony stood patiently, unblinking, without moving. Like an old blasé horse being shod, Oliver thought.

Oliver used the razor a little uncertainly, in small, tentative strokes. He had never shaved anyone else before and it was different from shaving yourself. As he worked, he remembered, sharply, the day that his own father had shaved him for the first time. It had been the summer when he was fourteen, in the big house at Watch Hill, facing the ocean, and his father had come up for the week-end and had squinted at him, puzzledly, for several hours, much as he himself had squinted at Tony during lunch. Only, at the end of it, his father had burst into laughter and had roughly mussed Oliver’s hair and had marched him up to the old, dark mahogany bathroom, shouting through the halls for the entire family to come and watch.

Oliver’s older brother wasn’t there that week-end, but his mother and his two sisters, aged twelve and ten, a little disturbed by the unaccustomed boisterousness of their father, had appeared at the doorway of the bathroom, where Oliver was standing, grinning uneasily and stripped to the waist, while Oliver’s father methodically stropped his ivory-handled, straight-edge razor.

As Oliver cautiously made narrow swathes in the shaving cream on Tony’s cheek, he remembered, with total clarity, the exact, flat, pleasing, rhythmic noise that the razor in his father’s hand had made against the leather strap that hung next to the marble basin in the bathroom on the seashore in 1912. He remembered, too, the dry smell of the shaving soap, the feel of the badger-hair brush, the mixed smell of his father’s bay rum and his mother’s lavender that always hung in a thin, mysterious perfume in the bathroom. He remembered the feel of the ocean salt on his bare shoulders from the morning swim, and his mother in a blue organdy dress and his sisters, barelegged and grave, at the door of the bathroom.

“Come in, come in,” his father had said. “Watch the initiation of a man, ladies.”

His mother and sisters had stood there in the doorway, while his father had worked up the lather on his face, but when his father had taken the razor and had flipped it three or four times on the palm of his hand, his mother had tapped the shoulders of her daughters and had said, “This is no place for us, girls. This is for the males of the tribe.” She had been smiling, but the smile had been a funny one, one that Oliver had never seen on his mother’s face before, and she had firmly led the girls out and closed the bathroom door before Oliver’s father had made the first stroke with the razor. Oliver’s father had watched silently, gravely, for several long moments after the door had closed. Then he had chuckled, and holding Oliver’s chin with one hand, he had shaved him, swiftly, accurately, with assurance. Oliver still remembered the feel of his father’s fingers on his jaw, firm, strong, gentle—and, he realized much later, after his father was dead, full of love and regret.

With his own hand on his son’s chin, conscious that his movements lacked the assurance of his father’s at that distant, similar ceremony, Oliver was obscurely oppressed by the recurrence of rites, with their different weight of love and gayety. Remembering, for the first time in many years, vanished summers, almost-forgotten children, unvisited rooms, his robust and sure-fingered dead father, Oliver had the feeling that when Tony, in his turn, looked back from the vantage point of maturity on this half-comic, half-solemn moment, in the bare, neat dormitory room, with its flaking skeleton and its map marked with the colored pins of escape, he would have reason to complain of his father.

None of this showed on his face, Oliver was sure, as he matter-of-factly scraped the thick white cream from Tony’s jaws and chin. He finished, taking the last bit of fuzz off the boy’s upper lip, and stepped back. “There we are,” he said. “Now wash your face.”

Tony bent over the basin, cupping water in his hands and splashing himself vigorously. Oliver looked at the bent, naked back, thin, but with a wiry shape of muscle that the ill-fitting jacket had belied. The skin, Oliver noted suddenly, was exactly the same color and texture as Lucy’s, soft, very smooth, very white, with a healthy, glowing flush of blood near the surface.

When Tony straightened up and dried his face, he looked, for the first time, into the mirror above the washbasin. Staring at himself, he touched, with one hand, the new smoothness of his cheeks. Oliver, standing behind him, met Tony’s eyes in the mirror. With the glasses off, they were exactly Lucy’s eyes, large, deep gray, shadowy, intelligent. Suddenly, examining his son’s scrubbed, lean, adolescent face in the mirror, Oliver realized that Tony was going to be a spectacularly handsome man.

Almost as if he had divined what was going on in his father’s mind, Tony grinned at Oliver in the mirror. “Boy,” he said, embarrassed and pleased with himself, “we’re going to kill them.”

Then they both chuckled. And then Oliver knew that it was going to be impossible to leave Tony to the Thanksgiving dinner of the Hollises, to the headmaster’s hearty, paid-up hospitality, and his regretful misgivings, to the mournful prophecies he would make to his buxom wife about the future he foresaw for young Crown, to the company of the deserted boys whose parents were in India or who came from broken homes and had failed to get invited for the holidays to homes that were not yet broken.

“Pack your bag, Tony,” Oliver said crisply. “I’m taking you home for the week-end.”

Tony remained motionless for a second, searching his father’s face in the mirror. Then, without smiling, he nodded, and put on his shirt, and unhurriedly and efficiently packed his bag.

On the drive toward New York, just as they neared the city limits, Tony asked, “How is Mother?”

“Fine,” Oliver said.

It was the first time they had mentioned Lucy between them in two years.

Lucy came to the Pennsylvania Hotel bar five minutes before six. Keeping an obscure and unvoiced bargain with herself, she was always on time now and never kept Oliver waiting when they went out together or had an appointment to meet each other. The bar was full of commuters catching a last drink or two before getting their trains to New Jersey or Long Island, and there was a sign that announced that unescorted ladies would not be served at the bar. She found a table in a corner and ordered a whisky. She sat modestly in her corner, waiting for her husband, looking from time to time without shyness at the men who crowded around the bar, not lowering her eyes when they glanced at her. They looked gray and worn by the day’s work, and they drank greedily, as though they needed the liquor to face the trip home and the evening ahead of them. Freshly bathed and dressed herself, prepared for holiday, she felt a touch of pity and contempt, observing them in their drab, office-staled clothes. She was looking forward to the dinner with Oliver in an Italian restaurant nearby that they both liked. And after that, the night on the train together. She had a childish love of trains and felt cosy and important sleeping in a compartment, listening to the sound of the wheels. And Oliver was a good traveler, attentive and much more talkative and light-hearted when he was away from home.

Then she saw Oliver coming toward her, moving among the crowded tables. She smiled and waved at him. He didn’t smile back. Instead, he halted for a moment, to allow someone who was walking behind him to come abreast of him. The two figures stood there, some thirty feet away, in the narrow aisle between the tables, cigarette smoke drifting lightly around their heads.

Lucy blinked, and shook her head. Impossible, she thought.

Then the two figures advanced toward her and, without realizing what she was doing, she stood up. What a place to see him, she thought. In a bar like this.

Oliver and Tony stopped across the table from her. They stood that way, confronting each other silently.

“Hello, Mother,” Tony said, and she heard that his voice had changed.

“Hello, Tony,” she said.

She looked from one face to the other. Tony seemed wary, but not uneasy or embarrassed. Oliver was regarding her closely, his expression somber, watchful, vaguely threatening.

Lucy sighed, gently. Then she moved out from behind the table and put her arms around Tony and kissed his cheek. He stood there, his hands at his sides, permitting himself to be kissed.

He looks awfully tall and old to be my son, Lucy thought, conscious of the commuters watching the family scene.

“We’re not going South,” Oliver said. “We’re all going home for the week-end.”

It was more than a statement, and she knew it. It was a demand, a question, an assertion of change, a warning.

Lucy hesitated only a moment. “Of course,” she said.

“You two stay here,” Oliver said. “I’ll go across the street and turn in the tickets. I’ll be right back.”

“No,” Lucy said, panicky at the idea of being left alone, so abruptly, with Tony. “It’s terribly noisy and smoky here. We’ll all go together.”

Oliver nodded. “Whatever you say.”

In the station she stood close to Oliver at the ticket window while he wrangled with the man behind the wicket. She kept talking, in a voice which sounded, even to her, high and unnatural and artificially animated. “Well, this changes everything, doesn’t it? We have a huge amount of planning to do. The first thing is to make sure we have something to eat in the house for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. You know what we’ll do … we’ll go down to those wonderful Italian shops on Eighth Avenue, because all the stores’ll be closed tomorrow at home, and we’ll buy a turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce and chestnuts for the dressing …”

“By God,” Oliver said to the man behind the window, “I’m giving you four hours’ notice. That’s enough for any railroad. When you buy a ticket you don’t make a contract for life, do you?”

The man grumbled and said he had to talk to the night manager and he left and could be seen talking, bent over, to a gray-haired man behind a desk, who occasionally glanced up bleakly at the window at which Oliver was standing.

Tony stood silently, listening to his mother, scanning the crowds moving through the station.

“And we’ll go into Schrafft’s,” Lucy went on, still in the high, nervous voice, “and get a pumpkin pie and a mince pie, and we’ll buy some bread for cold turkey sandwiches for tomorrow night. And do you know what I think we ought to do tonight, Oliver …” She paused, waiting for him to answer, but he was glowering at the clerk and the manager and he didn’t reply. “Tonight, let’s eat in Luigi’s, with Tony. Do you like Italian food, Tony?”

Tony turned slowly and looked at her, across the gap of the two years, across the gap in which knowledge of each other’s tastes and manners and idiosyncrasies had disappeared. “I like it all right,” he said, speaking a little more slowly than usual, as if he understood that his mother was going on at a rate and a pitch that was not normal for her and as if, by his own sobriety, he hoped to tone her down.

“Good!” Lucy said, with too much enthusiasm. “It’s your father’s and my favorite restaurant,” she said, offering it to him, offering him, in the same sentence, a picture of shared tastes, marital harmony, friendship. “And then, after that, Oliver, do you know what I think we ought to do with Tony?”

“It’s about time,” Oliver said to the clerk, who had just come back to his station and was unpleasantly counting out the money for the exchanged tickets.

“We ought to go see a show together,” Lucy said. “Do you like the theatre, Tony?”

“Yes,” Tony said.

“Do you go often?”

“Once in a while.”

“Maybe we can get into a musical comedy,” Lucy said. “What do you think, Oliver?”

Oliver turned away from the ticket window, after a disapproving grunt of farewell for the clerk. “What’s that?” he asked.

“I was saying,” Lucy said, talking swiftly, as though by the continual froth of her conversation she could keep any of them from taking stock of themselves and each other, “that maybe we could take Tony to a musical comedy. Since it’s a holiday evening and we’re all here in town together and …”

“What about it, Tony?” Oliver asked. “You want to go to the theatre?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Tony. “But if it’s all the same to you, not to a musical comedy. There’s a play I heard about … Thunder Rock. I’d like to see that, if we can get tickets.”

“Thunder Rock,” Lucy said, making a little grimace. “I heard it’s terribly morbid.”

“There’s no sense in wasting time on a musical comedy,” Tony said firmly. “It’d be different if I lived in New York and got to the theatre all the time.”

“Oliver …” Lucy said doubtfully. She was afraid of the effect on them of a grim play, afraid of the moment when they came out of the theatre, wary and uncertain of each other, and disturbed by two hours of dark emotion. A musical comedy, inconsequential and pretty, would make things easier.

“It’s Tony’s party,” Oliver said, as they walked toward the steps leading out of the station. “The first thing we’ll do is go into the hotel and see if they can get us the tickets.”

Lucy fell silent, walking between her husband and her son. He’s beginning to make everybody’s decisions again, she thought resentfully.

She conducted the shopping tour through the crowded, holiday-eve markets with an extravagant and almost hysterical open-handedness, piling her purchases indiscriminately into Oliver’s or Tony’s arms, talking steadily, adding to the morrow’s menu, her eyes roving across the hanging rows of turkeys, the piled pyramids of oranges, apples, tangerines, grapefruit, the displays of South American melons and pineapples, the bins of potatoes and chestnuts. Then they were late and they dumped their purchases into the trunk of the car and hurried to the restaurant, where Lucy drank too much, without realizing what she was doing, and where they had to cut the meal short to get to the theatre on time. As she shopped, and rattled on, and nervously ate and drank, Lucy was conscious only of a need for postponement. Dazed by the sudden appearance of Tony, uncertain whether it was an ambush or a reinforcement to her happiness, too unstrung to be able to see what signals either Oliver or Tony were putting up, she fought confusedly to keep from making any decisions herself in those first hours or permitting the others to make any decisions on their own part.

In the theatre, she was drowsy and only listened intermittently to what the actors were saying on the stage. Between the acts she said she was too tired to go out, and sat numbly by herself when Oliver took Tony across the street for a Coca-Cola. And on the long trip home, she sat in the back of the car, not quite awake, not trying to hear what Tony and Oliver were saying to each other in the quiet darkness in front of her. When they got home, she nearly stumbled going up the front steps and said, quite truthfully, that she couldn’t keep her eyes open another minute. She kissed Tony good night, briskly and without emotion, as though the two years had not intervened, and left Oliver with the job of settling the boy down in the guest room.

It was a retreat and she knew it and she was sure that Oliver, at least, and probably Tony, too, understood it, but she was too tired to care. When she got into bed and turned out the light, she had a little weary flicker of triumph. I got through the whole evening, she thought, and nothing happened. Tomorrow I’ll be fresh and I’ll take hold.

As she drifted off to sleep she heard the voices of Oliver and Tony, low, friendly, intimate, on the other side of the bedroom door and the male tread of their footsteps going down the hallway to the guest room at the back of the house. They walk so heavily, she thought. Both of them.

She wondered whether Oliver would come into her room to sleep tonight. And if he did, for whom would he be doing it? Himself? Her? Tony?

She folded her arms across her breasts and held her shoulders, because she was shivering with cold.

She was asleep when Oliver came into the darkened room, and the careful sounds he made as he undressed and got into the bed didn’t awaken her.

Usually she awoke fairly early, but on this Thanksgiving morning, she slept till past ten o’clock, and when she woke she felt heavy and hangover-ish. She moved slowly as she washed and combed her hair, and she dressed with more care than she ordinarily took in the mornings. Whatever opinion he has of me, she thought grimly, at least he’s going to admit that his mother is not bad-looking.

She heard no sounds in the rest of the house and she took it for granted that Oliver and Tony were either in the living room or the breakfast room, off the kitchen, downstairs. But when she went down she saw that the house was empty, shining in the morning sunlight, with two sets of breakfast dishes neatly washed and left in the wire frame on one side of the kitchen sink to dry.

There was a note on the kitchen table in Oliver’s handwriting, and she hesitated before picking it up and reading it, disturbed by absurd fears that there would be news in it of departures, discoveries, denunciations. But when she picked it up and read it, all it said was that they’d had their breakfast and they hadn’t wanted to wake her and that since it was such a fine morning they were going to a high-school football game in town that was to start at eleven o’clock. They would be back, the note went on, in Oliver’s precise and authoritative handwriting, not much later than one-thirty and they would be ready for the turkey. Love, Oliver, it ended.

She was grateful for the respite and she bustled around the kitchen, cleaning the turkey, putting the cranberries up to cook, roasting and shelling the chestnuts, moving swiftly and automatically about her chores, glad that the maid had been given the week-end off and that she had to do the work herself and that she had the house all to herself to do it in. When, during the morning, flushed from her work and the heat of the oven, she thought of Tony, it was almost carelessly. It all seemed so normal—in how many homes throughout the country was the son of the house back from school for the holiday and out watching a football game with his father while the mother prepared the standard feast. And if Tony had not been wildly affectionate the evening before, that was to be expected. He hadn’t been antagonistic, either. His attitude, if it had been an attitude, could be described as neutral. A little warmer and better than neutral, Lucy corrected herself, basting the bird. She hummed comfortably to herself in the sunny kitchen. After all, two years is a long time, she thought, especially in the life of a boy. A lot of things are forgotten in two years—or at least blurred over and softened. She herself, she thought comfortably, setting the table, couldn’t remember clearly just what had happened two years ago and it had all flattened out and lost the power of damaging her. At this distance it was hard to remember just why everybody had made such a crisis out of it.

Looking at the table, with the linen white, the glasses shining, she regretted for an instant that it was only going to be the three of them for the meal. It would have been nice to have some other families in, and other boys and girls Tony’s age. She closed her eyes and imagined what the table would look like, with the grownups at one end and five or six boys and girls, scrubbed, in their best clothes, the girls at that marvelous, shining age when from moment to moment they teetered back and forth between being children and young women.

For Christmas,. Lucy decided, I’m going to arrange something big. Standing there, looking at the glittering table and thinking about Christmas, she was happier than she had been in many years.

She glanced at her watch, went into the kitchen to take a last look around and sniff, luxuriously, all the warm and pungent smells of the dinner. Then she went upstairs and took a long time surveying the dresses hanging in her closet, trying to decide which one might please Tony best. She chose a soft blue dress with a wide skirt and a high neck and long sleeves. Today, she thought, he’d probably prefer me to look motherly.

Oliver and Tony came back at a quarter to two, both of them flushed from the cold and entertained by the game they had seen. Lucy was waiting for them in the living room, in her motherly dress, proud that everything had been efficiently prepared, with fifteen minutes to spare, and that they could find her sitting in the orderly, bright room, calm, leisurely, ready for them. She heard them coming in through the front door and the pleasant male mumble of their voices, and when they entered the room she smiled at them, secretly observing that while he was undoubtedly Oliver’s son, his resemblance to her, the wide brow, the long gray eyes, the fine blond hair, was overwhelmingly strong.

“God, it smells good in here,” Oliver said. He had obviously enjoyed his morning and he was smiling and full of energy and the nervousness and somber watchfulness of the night before had vanished. He only glanced at her briefly but she could tell that he was pleased with her. Perhaps it wasn’t all quite real—perhaps it was all prepared and staged, his glance told her, but it was well staged.

“We met Fred Collins and his daughter at the game,” Oliver said, standing in front of the fire, “and I invited them up here for a drink on the way home. They’ll be here in a minute. Is the ice out?” He looked over at the silver ice bucket on the sideboard that they used as a bar.

“Yes,” Lucy said, satisfied with herself because she had thought of that, too, because today she was thinking of everything. She smiled up at the two of them, standing side by side in front of the fire, in their tweeds and flannel trousers, the boy almost as tall as the father, filling the room with a sense of the crisp holiday outdoor morning. Tony looked at home, as though he was familiar with every corner of the room, as though he had lived here a long time and could move about the house carelessly and without strangeness.

“Did you like the game?” Lucy asked.

“It was a pretty good game,” Tony said.

“There’s a fullback who’s going to go places in college, if they don’t break his neck for him first.”

“Do you like football?” Lucy said.

“Uhuh,” said Tony. “As long as I’m not expected to root for anybody.”

Oliver gave Tony a swift, searching look, and Lucy thought, I must stop asking him direct questions about himself. The answers always are a little queer, and not what you would really want to hear from your son. Disturbed, she stood up and went over to the bar and fussed, getting out glasses, with her back to Oliver and Tony. She was relieved when the doorbell rang a few seconds later and Oliver went to the front hall to let in Fred Collins and his daughter.

There was a kind of roaring at the front door because Fred Collins talked like that. He came from Oregon and he had the notion that the way you demonstrated the virtues of the primitive and open-handed West was to talk at the top of your voice at all times. He was a big man with a crushing handshake and he still affected a wide-brimmed, vaguely Texan kind of felt hat and he drank a good deal and organized poker games and he was always taking Oliver off to go hunting for deer and birds. Twice a year he discovered prize fighters who would make everybody forget Joe Louis and he had once taken Oliver all the way out to Cleveland to watch his current discovery get knocked out in three rounds by a Puerto Rican. Although she had never seen him put to the test, Lucy believed that he was generous and good-hearted and she was grateful to him for taking Oliver off so many evenings of the year and on the protracted trips to hunting camps and distant arenas.

He had a pretty, rather washed-out-looking wife whom he called Sweetheart and whom he treated with the cumbrous gallantry of a bear in the zoo. His daughter Betty was only fifteen years old, small, honey-colored, confident of herself, coldly coquettish, and, as Lucy described her privately, ripening daily into wickedness. Even Oliver, who was among the least susceptible of men, confessed that when Betty Collins came into a room, she made him uncomfortable.

“I’m telling you, Ollie,” Collins was saying, his words clearly discernible in the living room, “that boy is a find. Did you see the way he cut back when they piled up in front of him at the tackles? He’s a natural.” In the autumn, Collins supplemented his discoveries of fighters who would make everybody forget Joe Louis by discoveries of backs who would make everybody forget Red Grange. “I’m going to write my old coach at Oregon and tell him about this boy, and maybe get to him with an offer. We could use him out there.” Collins had left college more than twenty years before, and he hadn’t been back in Oregon for more than a decade, but his loyalty never wavered. He was also loyal to the American Legion, of which he was an officer, several secret societies, and to the New Jersey State Republican Committee, which was at the moment rocking under the hammer-blows of the Roosevelt dynasty. “Don’t you agree, Ollie?” Collins asked, invisible but loud. “He’d really be something in Oregon, wouldn’t he?”

“You’re absolutely right, Fred,” Lucy heard Oliver murmur, approaching down the hall. Collins was the only person who ever had called him Ollie. It made Lucy wince every time she heard it, but Oliver hadn’t ever complained about it.

The men came into the room, herding Betty in front of them. Betty smiled at Lucy and said, “Hello, Mrs. Crown,” in the voice that, as much as anything else about her, made men uncomfortable in her presence.

Collins stopped melodramatically at the doorway. “By God,” he roared, spreading his arms like a wrestler preparing to grapple an opponent. “What a vision! Now, here’s something really to be thankful for! Ollie, if I was a churchgoing man, I’d go to church this afternoon and praise the Lord for making your wife so beautiful.” He advanced on her, rolling archly. “I can’t resist it, Ma’am, I just can’t resist it,” he shouted, taking her into his arms. “You’re getting prettier every day. Son,” he said to Tony, who was standing at the doorway, watching carefully, “with your permission I’m going to kiss your mother, because it’s a holiday and because she’s the loveliest lady on this side of the Mississippi River.”

Without waiting for an answer from Tony, Collins gripped her tight, the wrestler coming to close quarters, and kissed her loudly on each cheek. Almost smothered by the man’s bulk, Lucy laughed, a little uneasily, permitting herself to be kissed, because if you allowed Collins into the house you had to take him with all his noise and all his rough-hewn and boisterous gallantry. She had a glimpse, past Collins’ head, of Tony. Tony wasn’t looking at her now, but had turned and was watching Oliver with an expression of scientific interest on his face.

Lucy couldn’t see Oliver, and Collins pressed her heartily to his barrel-like chest once more, crying, incomprehensibly, but with the best will in the world, “Venus! Venus!” Then, winking broadly and rolling his head lewdly, he said, in a loud stage whisper, “Baby, my car is waiting, with the motor running. Just say the word and off we go. The first night of the new moon. Watch out for me, Ollie, boy, watch out for me. She brings out my tiger blood.” He roared with laughter and let her go.

“That’s enough, now, Fred,” Lucy said, knowing how ineffectual it must sound in the midst of all that bellowing and lip-smacking. She looked over again at Tony, but his eyes were fixed on his father, coolly, expectantly.

But Oliver didn’t seem to notice. He had seen so much of Collins in the last year that the noise and confusion that surrounded him by now seemed normal, as the sound of a waterfall finally seems almost like silence to people who live next to it.

Collins finally released her and sank expansively onto the couch, pulling his daughter down beside him and fondling her hand in his. “Ah, these cushions feel good,” he said. “Those benches at the game are awfully rough on the derrière.” He beamed with coarse benevolence at Tony. “He’s a fine-looking boy, Lucy. A little stringy so far, eh, Son, but that’s the age for it. When I was your age you may not believe it, but I only weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds, soaking wet.” He laughed loudly, as though what he had said had been irresistibly witty. “We’re glad we finally met the young Crown prince, aren’t we, Honey?” He peered lovingly into his daughter’s eyes.

Betty looked consideringly at Tony, using her lashes. “Yes, Daddy,” she said.

“Yes, Daddy,” Collins mimicked her in a quivering falsetto. “Oh, the volumes that’re concealed in those two simple words. Yes, Daddy.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, entranced with his own vision of his daughter. “Beware this girl, Son,” he said. “She has her eye on you. I recognize the signs. Consider yourself lucky and beware! The whole senior class of the high school would give up their next year’s allowance for that little Yes, Daddy.”

“Now, Daddy, stop …” Betty said, tapping her father’s hand reprovingly.

“When we went through the stands to our seats this morning,” Collins said, booming, “you could hear the sigh of desire sweeping across the cheering section like the wind through a field of wheat.” He laughed fondly, proud, overt, simple-minded.

Oliver, who was standing by the fire now, next to Tony, laughed, too. Tony looked at him, unamused, icily puzzled.

“Say, Betty,” Collins said, “aren’t you going to a dance tonight?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

“Why don’t you take Tony along with you?” Collins said. “If he’s half the man his daddy is, I’ll bet he’ll be able to show you a thing or two.”

Nervously, Lucy glanced at Tony. He was peering at Collins, studying him, as though Collins were an animal he had never seen before and which he was trying to place in its proper category.

“Well, I’d love to,” Betty said, smiling at Tony, using her medium artillery. “I honestly would. But I promised Chris I’d let him take me and …”

“Chris, Chris!” Collins waved impatiently. “You know you have no use for him. We can’t let Tony just mope around with the old folks on his holiday. Let ’em both take you.”

“Well, of course, that would be lovely,” Betty said, and Lucy was sure the girl was calculating secretly the impact of the moment of her arrival at the dance with a boy on each arm. “If Tony would like to …”

“Of course Tony would like to,” Collins said. “You be at our house at nine o’clock tonight, Son, and …”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” Tony said. “I’m busy this evening.”

He spoke very quietly and it cut into the booming torrent of Collins’ sound, coldly polite, uninterested, a rebuke to the loud and foolish father and the coquettish and triumphant daughter. There was nothing boyish or hesitant about it. It was an adult and chilly snub, fastidiously administered. Betty did not mistake it. She glanced thoughtfully at Tony, annoyed and interested, her face open for a moment, revealed. Then she dropped her eyes, covering up.

Where did he learn to behave like this, Lucy wondered. What has he had to do with girls in the past two years that makes him so sure of himself? And seeing Collins now through Tony’s eyes, she realized, painfully, that as recently as a year ago, Oliver would never have permitted either the man or his daughter to enter the house.

Collins didn’t miss it either. He narrowed his eyes, measuring Tony, understanding antagonism. The room was uneasily silent, the atmosphere strained. Only Tony, of all of them, Lucy felt, was undisturbed. Then Collins patted his daughter’s hand protectively.

“Well,” he said, “you had your chance, Son.” He turned to Oliver. “Didn’t you say something about a drink, Ollie?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Oliver said. “What’ll it be?”

“Martinis,” Collins said. “It’s the only drink for Thanksgiving.” He laughed, emptily, reaching for his wavering assurance.

Oliver started to put the ice into the shaker and open a bottle of gin. They all watched him with exaggerated interest, trying to ignore the breach that Tony had opened between them.

“No, no, no,” Collins said, jumping up. “You’re drowning it in vermouth, lad.” He went over to the bar and took the shaker from Oliver’s hand. “You’ll ruin the holiday, Ollie! Here, let me make it, let the old martini-master get to work.”

“If you want.” Oliver relinquished the gin bottle, too. “We usually drink whisky and I …”

“It’s all in the wrist, all in the wrist, my boy,” Collins said, pouring elaborately, squinting with one eye. “I learned it from an old Indian out in the big woods …”

“I’ll do it.” It was Tony. He had moved, unhurried, between the two men, and he took the shaker from Collins’ hand.

Collins stood there, his mouth open foolishly, his hand still curved in the position it had been in when he was holding the shaker.

“In this house, Mr. Collins,” Tony said, “we supply our own bartenders.”

Calmly, Tony poured the gin and the vermouth and began to mix the drink, staring at Oliver, rebuking him silently and pitilessly.

“Sure, sure …” Collins said. He shrugged, disciplined, wanting to react, not knowing just how. He went back to the couch and sat down, dismissed.

Tony stood next to the bar, stirring, ignoring Collins, looking steadily and contemptuously at his father. Oliver met his eye briefly, smiled uncomfortably, and moved away. “Well,” he said, more loudly than was necessary, “that’s the advantage of sending your son to a good school. They teach him to make martinis.”

He laughed, falsely, and Lucy felt she couldn’t stay in the room a moment longer. She sprang up from her chair. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have to go and see that the dinner isn’t burning up.”

She fled into the kitchen, making sure the door was shut tight behind her, so that she wouldn’t hear what they were saying in the living room. She worked distractedly, uselessly, not paying attention to what she was doing, wishing that the day was over, the week-end, the year … Oh, God, she thought, the accidents! Why did they have to meet Collins at the game? Why couldn’t it have been raining, so that they would never have left the house? Why did Oliver have to invite him over? Why did I let him kiss me? Why does Oliver let him call him Ollie?

She put the turkey on the platter and the sweet potatoes around it and the gravy in a boat and the cranberry sauce in a bowl. Then she sat down next to the window, staring out at the graying afternoon, her hands folded desolately in her lap, waiting until she heard the voices die down in the living room, and a few minutes later, the sound of Collins’ car going off down the street.

Then she carried the holiday turkey into the dining room, smiling almost correctly, crying, “Dinner, dinner,” knowing that nothing was going to be any good.

Tony hardly talked during the meal and Oliver talked too much, drinking almost a whole bottle of wine, and making a rambling speech about politics and taxes and the possibility of war, speaking with his mouth full of food, looking over their heads, not waiting for answers.

After the meal was over, Oliver said he had promised Collins he was going to walk over to his house for a brandy. He asked Tony and Lucy if they wanted to go with him and seemed relieved when Tony said, “No,” and Lucy said that she was tired and wanted to take a nap.

Oliver went out of the house, humming, loudly, a march that the high-school band had played between the halves that morning. For a moment, left alone at the cluttered table with Tony, Lucy thought that, finally, she could talk to him, and, by saying the exact, right word, cure them all. But Tony’s face was still and removed and she got up from the table and said, “Leave everything, I’ll clear it up later,” and went up to her bedroom without looking back.

She lay down on the bed and dozed a bit, pursued by dreams, and doors seemed to open and close in her dreams and there were steps in a shadowy, distant hallway and a final soft thud of a faraway door shutting.

When she woke, unrefreshed, she went down to the living room and it was without surprise that she saw the note on the library table. She picked it up and took the note out of the envelope and read, still unsurprised, in Tony’s handwriting, that he had decided that it would be better if he went back to school.

“I despise what you have done to my father,” he wrote, “and what you have made him turn into and I don’t want to see him again in this house with you and with the kind of friends you have driven him to.”

There was something that had been heavily scratched out at the end of the letter and for a while she didn’t bother to try to decipher it. She sat wearily in the dimming November afternoon light, the letter in her hand, oppressed by accident and failure.

After a while she turned on a lamp and looked more closely at the scratched-out sentence that ended the note. She puzzled over it, holding it directly under the lamp light, and after a minute or two she saw what Tony had put there.

“I repudiate you,” he had written, and she wondered why he had taken the trouble to cross it out.