Lucy Crown

19

THE 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?”

“I’m sure,” he said. He doused his cigarette into the ashtray on the arm of his chair and watched her as she went out toward the kitchen.

In the kitchen, she dawdled, staring into the icebox, not wanting anything, but not wanting to go back and face Oliver again, annoyed with herself for being afraid of him, after so many years. She wondered if he was going to sleep in the house that night and if he was going to insist upon sleeping in the same bed with her. Before he had gone into the Army, they had had separate rooms, and there had been long periods when he hadn’t touched her at all. Then, suddenly, and for no particular reason or stimulus that she could ever discover, he would move into her room and stay with her three or four nights in a row. Then he would be as passionate, almost, as in the first days of their marriage, except that mixed with the hunger and the pleasure she would sense a hidden melancholy and regret.

Once he had gone into the Army she had volunteered to come down to see him at the various camps where he had been stationed, but he had refused to allow her to do it, saying that the work she was doing was too important to be sacrificed. He wrote her, dutifully, once a week, affectionate letters much more like the urbane and confident man he had been in the first years of her marriage than the abstracted and harried business executive he had seemed to become ever since they had left Hartford.

From time to time, after the Thanksgiving on which he had brought Tony home, she had thought of leaving him. If, among the men she knew, there had been one she could have persuaded herself she loved, she would have asked Oliver for a divorce.

Then the war came and Oliver went away. He was too old, really, to join up, and she was sure that he had done it to get away from her and the insoluble, continuing problem she presented to him, and she had allowed everything to slide, telling herself that when the war was over some final decision would have to be reached.

Standing in front of the refrigerator, looking in at the almost-bare shelves, she sighed, thinking about all this. It’s not much of a marriage, she thought wryly, but it’s a marriage. Probably it’s no worse than most.

There were some bottles of beer in the icebox and a piece of Swiss cheese, but she decided against them, although now she realized she was thirsty and would have liked the beer. She took out a bottle of milk instead, and poured herself a glass. Then she took a box of crackers from a shelf and carried it, with the glass of milk, into the living room. Let that be his last image of his wife to take to the wars with him, she thought, amused at her female slyness, innocently and girlishly sipping at a glass of milk at three o’clock in the morning.

Oliver hadn’t moved. He was still sitting, planted low in his chair, staring down at the carpet, a new cigarette hanging from his lips and the collar of his trenchcoat turned up around his ears.

Lucy sat down on the couch, putting the milk and crackers on the coffee table in front of her. From where she was sitting she saw Oliver in profile, and the lines of his face were unaccustomedly sharp and aquiline, stripped down by fatigue.

“You should have let me know you were coming,” she said, sipping at her milk.

“I didn’t expect to come,” Oliver said. “I only had the one night in New York and I decided to spend it with Tony.” His voice was low and a little hoarse, as if he had been shouting orders outdoors, in bad weather.

“How is he?” Lucy asked, because she felt Oliver expected her to ask.

“No good,” Oliver said. “No damn good at all.”

She didn’t reply, because there was nothing to say. She sat tensely on the edge of the couch, watching his profile, worn, coinlike, memorial, against the lamplight, sensing the double reproof, of himself and of her, in his judgment on their son.

He twisted his head slowly and peered at her, regarding her with a tipsy, scholarly gravity. “That’s a pretty dress,” he said surprisingly. “Have I seen it before?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you choose it yourself?”

“Yes.”

He nodded approvingly. “You were always a marvelous-looking woman,” he said “but you wore the wrong clothes. You underplayed yourself. Now you’ve learned how to dress. I like that. It makes no difference, but I like it.”

He turned his head again and leaned back against the chair and didn’t speak for more than a minute. His breathing was steady and Lucy wondered if he was falling asleep.

“We called you from New York, Tony and I,” he said suddenly, out of his immobility. “He was willing to talk to you. He’d have come out here with me, I think, if you’d have been home.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice.

“This one night,” Oliver said. “Why couldn’t you have been home this one night?” He stood up and faced her, a bulky, almost shapeless figure in the creased trenchcoat, with the belt dangling open. “Where were you?” he asked, his voice flat and unaccented.

Finally, Lucy thought, making herself look up candidly at him. “I was out,” she said. “I had an appointment.”

“You had an appointment.” He nodded, drunkenly agreeable. “An appointment to do what?”

“Now, Oliver, be reasonable,” Lucy said. “If I had known you were going to call, I certainly would have stayed home. It was just bad luck …”

“Just bad luck,” he said, plunging his hands in his pockets, lowering his head, his chin resting on his chest. “I’m tired of the bad luck. When does the good luck begin? I asked you a question—an appointment to do what?”

“I went out to dinner,” Lucy said calmly. “With a soldier, a young lieutenant I met at the hospital. A pilot.”

“Dinner with a pilot,” Oliver said. “You ate slowly. It was past three o’clock when he left you at the door. What else did you do?”

“Now, Oliver …” Lucy began. She stood up.

“What else did you do?” Oliver repeated in the same flat, unemotional voice. “Did you let him make love to you?”

Lucy sighed. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“He made love to me. Yes.”

Oliver nodded, still agreeable. “Was it the first time?”

Lucy hesitated, tempted to lie. Then she rejected the idea. “No,” she said.

“Do you love him?”

“No.”

“But you enjoy going to bed with him?”

“Actually, no.”

“Actually, no,” Oliver said gravely. “Then why did you do it?”

Lucy shrugged. “He was hurt when he was in Africa. Badly hurt. And he’s terribly frightened because he’s going out again, to the Pacific …”

“Oh, I see,” Oliver said reasonably. “It’s a form of patriotism.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Oliver,” Lucy said. “I pitied him. That’s understandable, isn’t it? He’s young and frightened and damaged. It seemed to mean a great deal to him …”

“Of course, I understand,” Oliver said, speaking gently. “Of course, in a hospital these days, there are hundreds of boys who are young and frightened and damaged. I, of course, am not young and I’m not frightened. But I guess you could say I’m damaged. Do you want to go to bed with me?”

“Oliver …” Lucy made a move toward the door. “You’re in no condition to talk right now. I’m going to sleep. If you insist on plowing through all this, I’ll answer any questions you want in the morning.”

Oliver made a gesture with his hand, stopping her. “I won’t be here in the morning. And I’m in marvelous condition for a talk like this right now. Drunk, insomniac and on the way out. When a man goes to war, there’s certain things he likes to leave in order behind him. His will, his memory, the exact status of his wife. Tell me,” he said conversationally, “there’ve been others, haven’t there?”

Lucy sighed. “A long time ago,” she said, “I told you I wasn’t going to lie to you any more, Oliver.”

“That’s exactly why I’m asking,” he said. “I want the true bill to take away with me.”

“Yes, there have been others,” Lucy said. “So?”

“When you stayed in the city overnight after the theatre,” Oliver said, “it wasn’t only because you didn’t want to come home alone so late on the train?”

“Yes.”

“Have you loved any of them?” Oliver peered at her closely now and took a step nearer her.

“No.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I regret to say it, but I haven’t,” Lucy said.

“Why not?”

“Maybe because I’m incapable of loving,” Lucy said. “Maybe because I love you. I don’t know.”

“Then why do you do it?” Oliver asked, standing in front of her, barring the way to the door. “Why the hell do you do it?”

“Maybe because it makes me feel important and ever since I was a girl I felt unimportant. Maybe because I feel empty. Maybe because for a few minutes each time it seems as though it’s going to mean something, as though there’s a puzzle I’m finally going to find the answer to. Maybe because I’m disappointed in myself and in you and in Tony. Maybe because I’m worthless or my mother left me alone one night when I was two years old.” She shrugged. “Maybe because it just happens to be the style these days. I don’t know. Now I’m going to sleep.” She took another step toward the door.

“One more question,” Oliver said, his voice low, hollow with fatigue. “Are you going to keep on?”

“I suppose so,” Lucy said wearily. “There must be an answer to the puzzle somewhere.”

They stood facing each other, Lucy rigid and defiant, Oliver stooped a little, thoughtful and questioning and rumpled in his dangling, stained coat. “Tell me, Lucy,” he said, and his voice was kindly, almost elegiac, with a tone of tender farewell in it, “are you happy?”

“No,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s the unforgivable thing,” he said, “not to be happy.”

He moved close to her, his hands hanging at his sides, staring deeply into her face, searching.

“You’re a clumsy, frivolous woman,” he said quietly.

Then he hit her. He hit her hard, with his closed fist, as though he were hitting a man.

She fell back a little, against the wall. She didn’t cry out and she made no move to defend herself. She stood there, straight, her back supported by the wall, looking steadily into his eyes. He sighed and took another step nearer her.

Then he hit her again, heavily, punishing her, punishing himself.

She felt the blood come to her lips and the lights of the lamps began to dance redly before her eyes, but she still didn’t try to defend herself. She stood with her chin up, watching him impersonally, with the blood dripping from her mouth, waiting. He had never struck her before, but it didn’t seem strange or unjust that he was doing it now. And even as he rained blows on her, heavily, soberly, with the ceremonial inevitability of a sentence being carried out, she kept staring into his eyes, forgivingly, understandingly.

It had to happen, she thought, with the roaring in her ears and the numbing pain of the blows, it was all arranged a long time ago.

When she slid down to the floor at the base of the wall, the pretty black dress splashed with blood and rumpled around her knees, Oliver stood above her for a moment, looking down at her, his face gentle and lost, framed by the upturned warlike collar of his coat.

Then he turned and went out of the house.

She lay there for a long time, long after she heard the door close behind him. Then she stood up and with housewifely thrift turned out all the lights in the living room, and switched the heat down before she went up to her room.

She didn’t leave the house for ten days after that because the bruises took that long to heal.