Lucy Crown

17

SHE WALKED AIMLESSLY FOR fifteen minutes, looking at the strange shop windows without really seeing what was in them, then hurried back to the corner of the street on which Tony lived. The bistro was there as he had said and there were several tables on a little terrace outside, under an awning, and she sat down and ordered coffee, to give herself something to do while waiting.

The scene in the apartment had unnerved her. Through the years, she had thought, of course, from time to time, of seeing Tony again, but in her imaginings of the encounter, it had usually been at a moment of drama—with her on her deathbed and Tony summoned to her side, youthful, gentle, forgiving in the face of the ultimate farewell. Then there would be the final expression of love, a last, healing kiss (although the face to be kissed had always stubbornly remained a thin, thirteen-year-old face, browned by the sun of that distant summer)—and then a miraculous recovery and a lasting reconciliation and friendship after it. She had also had a recurrent dream, less frequent in recent years, of Tony standing at her bedside, watching her sleep, saying, in a harsh whisper, “Die! Die!” But the way it had actually happened had been worse than either the bitter dream or the naive deathbed fantasy. It had been so accidental and confused and unpromising. She hadn’t really been certain that she had recognized him at the bar and she had been embarrassed because she was sitting at a night-club table with two college boys whom she had allowed, however innocently, to pick her up. And then there was the unhealthy impression of the shabby apartment and the disappointed wife, with her confessions of unhappiness and her despair for the future. And there had been the unexpected ache of seeing the little boy, with the almost familiar face, the mild, grave, inherited eyes, in a confusion of generations, seeming to condemn her once more across the years, putting a new and heavier burden of responsibility on her all over again. And then Tony himself—prematurely gray, prematurely weary, unpleasantly distant and careless with his wife, incuriously polite, unmoved and cool with herself. It was true, Lucy warned herself, that she might have been influenced by the unappetizing and perhaps distorted picture of Tony that Dora had given her before he came in. There was a good chance that Dora, nursing wifely grudges, especially after a night which her husband had spent away from home, might have misrepresented the case considerably. But even so, and making all allowances for Dora’s possible exaggerations, the impression Tony had made on her was a disturbing one.

And mixed up with it all was the image of her grandson, hopeful and vulnerable, caught between the failures and animosities of his parents, still too young to understand the bitter currents that were twisting his life, but inevitably to be shaped and damaged by them. God, Lucy thought, what will he be like finally? How long does the punishment go on?

Suddenly the memory of Tony’s smile in the disheveled living room, standing there between his wife and mother, his mouth pulled to one side in cynical amusement, seemed hateful and terrifying to her. It seemed to mock her and belittle her and endanger everything she had so carefully built up for herself since the war—the sense of purpose and accomplishment in her work, the feeling of having at last matured, of having come to honorable and rigorous terms with herself, the pride in having overcome accidents, in not being swamped by her faults, of having come into her sixth decade whole, robust and useful. Now, remembering Tony’s smile, all that was shaken, and once more she felt as she had at the end of the summer on the lake—uncertain, ashamed of herself, unloving. Some way, some way, she thought, I must get him to stop smiling like that.

She felt rushed and inefficient and she was frightened of the meeting that was ahead of her. What could she hope to accomplish here, in a few minutes, over a cup of coffee? There was a lifetime to be explained, an abyss to be bridged, and these things were not to be done in a half hour at a bistro table. She needed time, all the time she could get, and an atmosphere different from this ugly little café, with the stained waiters banging glassware in the background and a young man, who needed a shave and who looked as though he were hiding from the police, working on a racing form a couple of tables away.

Nervously, she opened her bag and took out a small mirror to examine her face. It looked anxious to her, and artificial, not her real face, not natural for the occasion. She put the mirror away, and was about to close the bag when she saw the letter she had taken from her valise in the hotel.

She took the letter out of the bag, a plan slowly beginning to form in her brain.

She pulled the letter out of its envelope, four sheets of flimsy paper, thin and almost transparent at the folds. She hadn’t read it in years, and she had only put it in her baggage at the last moment when she left America, not really understanding the impulse behind it, thinking, confusedly, Well, as long as I’m going to be in Europe …

She opened the letter and started reading.

“Dear Mrs. Crown,” the letter began, “I am in the hospital and I take this opportunity of writing to you about your loss.” The paper was stamped with the sign of the Red Cross and the handwriting was cramped, semi-literate, painful. “I suppose you have been notified by the War Dept. about the Major but I was there with the Major and I know that people feel easier in their minds when something like this happens if they hear exactly what took place at the time from someone that was on the spot. The name of the town was Ozières, if the censor don’t cut it out, you never know what they will pass, and I will remember it for a long time because I got hit there, too, excepting that I was lucky since I am a short man and the Major, as you remember, was a very tall man, and the machine gun must of been traversing on the same elevation and while I only got it in the shoulder and the neck (two 30 caliber) the Major, being taller, got hit in the lungs. If it is any consolation, he never knew what hit him. There was a Frenchman, too, but he was very quick and he jumped into the ditch and he never got scratched. I have been reading the papers from back home since I been in the hospital and they make it sound as though it was a parade after the breakthrough, but take it from someone who was in it, it was no parade. I was in a reconnaissance squadron, attached to Corps, we had some half-tracks but mostly jeeps, and we were all over the place in those days because nobody knew where anybody else was and there were pockets of Germans, some of them hostile and some of them just looking to give themselves up. There was no telling what you were going to run into until you moved in and they opened fire. Then you could run and maybe call back on the radio for help if you were lucky, which was our job. I’m not complaining, since I guess that it is the only way it could be done. As you probably know, the Major was attached to G₂ at Corps and a man couldn’t ask for a safer or more comfortable job than that in the ordinary run of things, but the Major was not like the usual officers you find at Corps, though I am sure they have their jobs to do back there and they do them to the best of their ability. But he was always poking around where there might be trouble, seeing for himself, and his jeep became a very familiar sight to us and he engaged personally with us in quite a few little actions of one kind and another and I am happy to say that as old as he was, he was as brave and as fearless as the day is long and cheerful and democratic. If he had a fault, it was that he exposed himself sometimes when it wasn’t one hundred percent necessary. Well, on the day he was killed, we were at a couple of farmhouses about five miles from Ozières, and there was nothing doing there and we were taking a break. A Frenchman, a farmer, came up to us and he said he was from outside Ozières, and there was a bunch of Germans maybe 18 or 20 hiding there that wanted to give themselves up. So the Major took the Frenchman along with him and another jeep with four more guys and we took off. If you happen to be in France and see Ozières, you will see, coming in from the north, there is a crossroads 200 yards outside the town and when we got near there, the Major stopped the jeeps and he said we better go in on foot. He cut off a stick from a hedge and he had a white towel in the jeep and he tied it onto the stick and he said to the Frenchman in French You come with me and he said to me Sergeant you better come along too and he told the other boys to turn the jeeps around in case there was any trouble and to spread out a little and to try to cover us if anything went wrong. The town was all buttoned up. They got shutters on the windows in France and they were all closed and there wasn’t anybody moving anywhere and it was so quiet and peaceful you would think you were back in Iowa. The Frenchman and the Major and myself started walking up the road, with the Major in the middle and there was no sign that anything was going to happen and the Frenchman was talking in French to the Major and the Major was answering him, he said he was in France a long time ago, before the war, and that is how he picked up the language, when all of a sudden, just as we got to the crossroads, without any warning, the machine gun opened up. As I said above, I was hit in the shoulder and neck, but I managed to roll over into the ditch alongside the road just the same and the Frenchman did the same on the other side. In case you think the Frenchman was not one hundred percent on the level, let me tell you it came as much as a surprise to him as to me, and I could hear him crying and swearing in French in the other ditch all the time we were laying there. The Major was out in the middle of the road and I looked up out of the ditch at him after awhile and I saw that there was nothing to be done for him. After the one burst, the Germans shut up and they were never heard from again. Anybody tells you the Germans play according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, you refer them to me, and I will show them the two holes in my shoulder and neck. Although you never can tell, they might really of wanted to give themselves up and then maybe some crazy officer showed up in town and gave them a pep talk. Anyway, the boys back at the jeeps fired a few rounds over our head at the town to show the Germans there would be trouble if they tried to come for us and one of them took one of the jeeps back to the farmhouses for the Lieutenant and he showed up in record time and he came and got us, right out in the open, without paying any attention to whether the Germans might open fire again at any moment. I heard the Lieutenant say He never knew what hit him while he was looking at the Major, as I said above and that is something. They put a field dressing on me and they got me back fast and I could not ask for better treatment. In case you want to correspond with the Lieutenant, his name is Lieutenant Charles C. Draper and he was very close to your husband almost like Father and Son, except that I have heard a rumor back here in the hospital that the Lieutenant was ambushed in Luxembourg, but it is only a rumor.

Yours Truly,

(Sgt.) Jack Mc Cardle.

p.s. They tell me I am going to get a medical discharge and a partial disability pension.

(Sgt.) Jack Mc Cardle.

Lucy folded the letter carefully and placed it in its envelope and dropped it back into her bag. Then she saw Tony coming toward her, on the shady side of the street. At least he turned out handsome, she thought, watching him approach, at least that. He walked deliberately, as though he planned each step. There was none of the exuberance or thoughtless grace of an athlete in the way he walked, but rather the feeling of a city man who has made a conscious decision long ago to be private to himself, not to allow himself to be swept up into the tempo of the crowds around him. He was wearing his dark glasses and they seemed like an affectation, because it was a cool day and there was no glare. They seemed like a further, conscious barrier that he was putting up between himself and the world, the stage props of a carefully guarded and unrelenting austerity.

He stopped at the table and Lucy saw that he had shaved and put on a clean shirt and a pressed suit, sober and well-cut and expensive-looking, which he carried easily and well, making Lucy remember the care and taste with which Oliver had always dressed. Tony’s expression was polite, but there was still the small, enigmatic twist at the corner of his mouth.

Lucy smiled up at him, making no claims of familiarity with the smile.

“You found it all right?” Tony said, seating himself beside her. “The bistro?”

“No trouble at all,” Lucy said, noting that Tony’s voice was softer and deeper than Oliver’s had been.

Tony nodded and signaled a waiter and ordered two coffees, without asking her whether she wanted another or not. “Dora told me you saw me in the bar last night,” he said. “You should have come over.”

“I wanted to think about it,” Lucy said, not telling him that she hadn’t been sure it was he.

“We could have had a bottle of champagne to celebrate,” he said. “A meeting like this would have been more fitting in the middle of the night.” He spoke mildly, his accent generalized American and hard to place, and Lucy couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of her or not. “Well, we’ll have to make do with coffee. Dora told me what you’re doing here in France. It sounds most impressive.”

“It’s not as impressive as all that,” Lucy said, searching for mockery and hurrying to turn its edge if it was there.

“Protecting the new generation all over the world,” said Tony. “They can use some protecting, can’t they? What did you think of Bobby?”

“He’s a beautiful little boy.”

“Yes, isn’t he?” Tony said objectively, admitting a fact. “He’ll change, though, before it’s too late.” He smiled. “When you left, he wanted to know where you’d been all this time.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Oh, I said you’d been busy,” Tony said lightly. “That seemed to satisfy him. You know the new theory about children, I’m sure. Tell them the truth, but only as much as they seem to want at the moment. No overload of truth at the age of four, the books say.”

The waiter came with their coffee and Lucy watched Tony stir the sugar into his cup. He had long hands, with the nails carelessly manicured and she remembered that until he was eight he had bitten them so badly that the cuticles had often bled. Now, the psychiatrists said, that was a sign of insecurity, a fear of being left alone, of being unloved. What the hell was he insecure about when he was eight? she thought. Maybe I’ll start biting my nails tonight.

She raised her cup and tasted the coffee. “It’s surprisingly good,” she said, like a well-mannered guest at her host’s favorite restaurant. “After everything you hear about French coffee.”

“When you visit a country,” Tony said, “you find that no one has ever told the truth about it.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes gently, in what looked like an habitual, assuaging gesture. Without the glasses, his eyes, deeply fringed with dark lashes, seemed thoughtful and gentle and the air of restraint and austerity vanished from his face.

“Do you still have to wear those dark glasses?” Lucy asked.

“Most of the time.”

“The eyes are no better?”

“No.”

“Have you tried doing anything about it?”

“Not for a long time,” Tony said, putting the glasses on again, giving Lucy the impression of a flat, impenetrable barrier being raised against her. “I tired of the medical fakes,” he said. Listening to his slow, unaccented deep voice, with its undertone of weariness and skepticism, Lucy remembered the rushed, shrill confusion of his speech when he was a boy. We saw a deer, she remembered, in the high adolescent tones. He came down to the lake to drink …

“Tony,” Lucy said, impulsively, “what’s the matter? What’s wrong with you?”

He looked surprised. He hesitated for a moment, twisting his cup in its saucer. “Ah,” he said, “I see that Dora didn’t waste her time.”

“It isn’t only Dora. Anybody can see in a minute that …”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Tony said harshly. He shook his head, irritated. Then he smiled and resumed the tone of formal good manners. “By the way, what did you think of her? Dora …”

“She’s very pretty.”

“Isn’t she?” Tony said pleasantly.

“And very unhappy.”

“That’s the way it goes,” he said, his voice flat.

“And afraid.”

“Who isn’t afraid these days?” Tony asked. Now he sounded flippant and impatient and Lucy had the feeling that he was on the verge of getting up from the table and fleeing.

“She’s afraid you’re going to leave her,” Lucy went on stubbornly, hoping that perhaps by disturbing him, questioning him, wounding him, to make a connection between them.

“It probably would be the best thing in the world for her,” Tony said, smiling. “It’s not so serious. Everybody we know leaves everybody else we know all the time.”

“Tony,” Lucy said hurriedly, moving away from that subject, “why do you live in Europe?”

Tony glanced at her, amusedly. “You’re so American,” he said. “Americans think it’s somehow immoral to live in Europe.”

“It’s not that,” Lucy said, thinking of the shabby, characterless, uncomfortable apartment, so obviously furnished only for brief passages and people without roots. “It’s just that you’re not at home here … and your wife and child.”

Tony nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s the great thing about it. It takes away most of the feeling of responsibility.”

“How long is it since you’ve been back home?”

Tony looked as though he were considering this. He tilted his head back and half-closed his eyes, the sun glittering on the dark glasses. “Eighteen years,” he said.

Lucy felt herself flushing. “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I meant since you were back in the States.”

“Five, six years,” he said carelessly, bringing his head forward again, and pushing his cup thoughtfully a little distance away from him on the table, like a man making a move on a chessboard.

“Do you ever intend to go back?”

Tony shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Who knows?”

“Is it a question of money?”

Tony grinned. “Ah,” he said, “I see that you’ve caught on that we’re not the richest young Americans in Europe.”

“What happened to all the money you got when the will was settled and the business was sold?” Lucy asked.

Tony shrugged again. “The usual,” he said. “False friends, riotous living and bad investments. Easy come, easy go. I wasn’t particularly anxious to hold onto it. It made me uncomfortable.” He peered at her closely. “How about you?” he asked. “Do you feel comfortable with it?” His tone was not censorious, merely inquisitive.

Lucy decided to ignore the question. “If you ever need any money …” she began.

Tony waved, interrupting her. “Be careful,” he said, “this may be costly.”

“I mean it.”

“I’ll remember it,” he said gravely.

“Dora says you’re not particularly happy with your work …”

“Did she actually say that?” Tony sounded surprised.

“Not exactly,” Lucy admitted. “But she said you used another name and …”

“I’m not good enough to make it really worth while,” Tony said thoughtfully, seeming to be talking for himself rather than for her. “And, after that, it’s just a grind. A rather pointless, depressing grind.”

“Why don’t you do something else?” Lucy asked.

“You sound like my wife.” Tony smiled. “It must be a general female optimism—that if you don’t like what you’re doing all you have to do is close up shop and start something else the next day.”

“What happened to the medical school?” Lucy asked. “I heard you were doing very well, until you quit …”

“I dabbled among the corpses for two years,” Tony said. “I had a light touch with the dead and my professors thought highly of me …”

“I heard,” Lucy said. “I know a man from Columbia and he told me. Why did you stop?”

“Well, when the estate was settled it seemed foolish to be slaving fourteen hours a day with all that money in the bank, and suddenly the idea of travel seemed very attractive. Besides,” he said, “I discovered I wasn’t interested in healing anybody.”

“Tony …” Lucy said. Her voice sounded strained inside her head, and muffled.

“Yes?”

“Are you really like this, Tony? Or are you putting it on?”

Tony leaned back and watched two girls in black dresses crossing the street diagonally in front of them. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m waiting for someone to tell me.”

“Tony,” Lucy said, “do you want me to get up from here and leave you alone?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He took off his glasses slowly and put them on the table with great care. Then he looked at her soberly, his face exposed, not defending himself, the deep, familiar eyes sad, considering. “No,” he said finally, and he reached out and touched her hand gently. “I couldn’t bear it.”

“Will you do something for me?”

“What?” Now his voice was guarded again.

“Will you come with me to Normandy today? I want to visit the town where your father was killed, and the cemetery in which he’s buried. I have a letter from a man who was with him when it happened and I know the name of the town … It’s Ozières.”

“Ozières,” Tony said, putting his glasses on again, restoring the barrier, as though he was already regretting the moment of softness. “I’ve passed through there. I saw no plaques.” He laughed sourly. “What a place to get killed in!”

“Didn’t you know?”

Tony shook his head. “No. You sent me a telegram that he’d been killed. That’s all.”

“Did you ever hear how it happened?”

“No.”

“He heard there were some Germans in the town who wanted to surrender,” Lucy said, “and he walked in under a white flag and five minutes later he was dead.”

“He was a little old for things like that,” Tony said.

“He wanted to get killed,” said Lucy.

“Read the papers,” Tony said. “The world is full of people who want to get killed.”

“Didn’t you get that feeling from him when you saw him during the war?”

“I didn’t see him much,” Tony said, staring past Lucy, obviously not wanting to talk about it. “And when I did see him the only feeling I got from him was embarrassment that I wasn’t in uniform.”

“Tony!” Lucy said. “That wasn’t true.”

“No?” He shrugged. “Perhaps not. Perhaps he was only embarrassed that I was alive.”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“Why not?” Tony said harshly. “I made up my mind a long time ago I wasn’t going to lie about the way we felt about each other, my father and I.”

“He loved you,” Lucy said.

“Under a white flag,” Tony said, as though he hadn’t heard her. “I suppose there’re worse ways for fathers to die. Tell me something …”

“Yes.”

“Did you really just see me by accident at that bar last night, or did you come to Paris knowing you were going to look for me?” He was watching her quizzically, his face ready to disbelieve her.

“I didn’t even know you were in Europe,” she said. “And when you went out and I asked the man if he knew where you lived, I think I was hoping he wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t be able to find out.”

Tony nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I can understand that.”

“I knew that, one day, we would have to meet somewhere,” Lucy said.

“I suppose so,” Tony said. “I suppose if you have a son you must eventually see him …”

“I would have arranged it differently,” Lucy said, remembering her fantasies, the deathbed, the kiss, “if I was arranging it.”

“Still,” said Tony, “this will have to do. So now you want to visit the grave … Well, that’s natural enough. I don’t say we should do it, but it’s natural enough. Tell me,” he said conversationally, “did you notice how vulgar he became toward the end?”

“No,” Lucy said.

“Of the dead only good.” Tony smiled harshly. “Of course. Loud and empty, full of officers’ club jokes and patriotic editorials and speculation about chorus girls. He was always asking me if I had enough money to have a good time. He winked when he said it. I always told him I could use an extra hundred.”

“He was a generous man,” Lucy said.

“Maybe that was what was wrong with him.” Tony looked up at the sky. It was clear and blue, burning out whitely toward the south. “It’s a good day for a trip to the country. I have a date for lunch, but I guess I can explain about dead fathers and returned mothers and things like that. I’ll explain I have to travel to a battlefield, under a white flag.”

“Don’t,” Lucy said thickly, standing up. “Don’t come with me if you feel like that.”

“Tell me,” Tony said, without moving, still staring up at the hot sky, “why do you want to do this?”

Lucy held onto the table to steady herself. She felt exhausted. She looked down at the tight, back-thrown face of her son, with the dark glasses casting a sharp, smoky shadow on the taut skin of his cheekbones.

“Because we destroyed him,” she said dully. “You and I. Because we must not forget him.”

Then she saw that Tony was crying. She watched, unbelievingly, clutching her gloves, as the tears rolled down from under his glasses. He bent forward in a sudden movement, covering his face.

He’s crying, she thought. There’s hope. He’s crying.