Lucy Crown

21

THEY DROVE IN SILENCE through the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. They went very fast, sweeping around the turns of the humped, narrow road, the tires squealing. Tony was tight over the wheel, and he seemed to Lucy to be driving fast and dangerously for a purpose, to keep himself so intent and concentrated on passing cars and managing curves that there was no chance of thinking about anything else.

She did not try to talk to him. I am expended, she thought dully. There’s nothing further I have to say.

They were approaching a village. It was still a quarter of a mile off, in a little declivity, a huddle of bluish slate roofs over gray stone, clustered around a church steeple.

“There it is,” Tony said.

Lucy stared through the windshield. The town lay quietly in the sunshine, surrounded by its green fields, with the road running straight into the middle of it, looking like a dozen other villages they had gone through.

“Well,” Tony asked, “what do you want to do?”

“It happened at a crossroads,” Lucy said. “I got a letter from a man who was with him and he said they were coming in from the north and there was a crossroads just outside the town.”

“North is on the other side,” Tony said.

They were silent as they drove through the village. The street was narrow and winding and the buildings were right along the edge, with boxes of geraniums in bloom under the windows. The shutters were closed on all the windows and Lucy had a sudden picture of all the inhabitants lurking within, balefully spying on the strangers rushing through their town in their noisy machines, breaking the centuries-old peace of the place, reminding them of their poverty and their bitter roots in this peasant soil, and of the hard lives they led.

Lucy remembered the Sergeant’s letter, and thought, distractedly, He crossed an ocean to take this empty place. And he never even reached it.

They were almost through the town by now and they still hadn’t seen a single person. The cracked shutters on the windows absorbed the glare of the sun and the single gas pump on the edge of the town was locked and unattended. It was almost as though, for her benefit, the town had remained exactly as it was, asleep and dangerous, on the day eleven years before when her husband had walked up the road toward it with a white towel on a stripped branch.

Tony was scowling a little as he drove through the town, as though he disapproved of the place. But it might only have been the effect of the sun, reflecting off the flaking stone walls. They pulled slowly out the other side of the village and Lucy saw the crossroads. Looking at it, the two narrow country roads, thick with white dust, intersecting each other in a meaningless small widening of their surfaces, Lucy had a sense of recognition that was almost pleasurable. It was like searching for something that you have lost, that has nagged you with its loss for many years, and suddenly coming upon it.

“Here,” she said. “Stop here.”

Tony pulled the car a little to one side, just before they reached the crossroads, although he couldn’t get all the way off the road because of the ditch that ran alongside it. The ditch was almost three feet deep and was overgrown with grass, powdered with the dust of the road. There were no trees, although there was a row of hedge a few yards back from the road.

Tony leaned back in his seat, stretching and working his shoulders.

“This is the place,” Lucy said. She got out of the car. Her legs were stiff and cramped and the sun beat down, very hot on the unshaded, bright road, now that they were no longer moving. She took off her scarf and pushed her hand through her hair and walked to the crossroads, the dust rising in little chalky puffs around her heels. The countryside slumbered all around them, empty and stretching and anonymous, without emotion, sending up a grassy, thin aroma.

In the distance there were several clusters of roofs and church steeples, other towns lost under the open sun. Only to the north, on the side away from the town, was the landscape broken. There was a rise about a hundred feet away and trees along the edges of the road which came down toward them in a gentle, direct slope, and Lucy could imagine, from the Sergeant’s letter, the jeeps parked facing in the other direction, just under the rise, and the four men in helmets lying there, rifles ready, their eyes just over the crest of the ridge, watching the town, watching the three figures walking through the hot naked sunlight in the white dust, coming up to the crossroads, outlined there for a moment in the blank and meaningless swelling, then starting on the other side toward the silent walls …

She paced slowly down the center of the road, thinking, I am treading on the spot. This is the place he was looking for, this is the place he was traveling to. Why did I come here? It is just a place, like any other. A back-country road, marked by cartwheels, in a part of Europe that looks as though it might be anywhere, Maryland, Maine, Delaware, with no sign any place within the horizon that a war ever passed this way, that armed men ever died here.

She shook her head. She felt empty and at a loss. There was no possible ceremony at this nondescript, vacant crossroads with which to dignify the moment or bring it to a climax. There were no symbols or monuments, just meaningless roads without history. She was conscious of Tony behind her, brooding and implacable, and suddenly resented his presence there. If she had been alone, or with someone else, anyone else, she thought, she would have been able to find significance in the moment, give way to sorrow or relief. I’m here with the wrong man, she thought.

Despite herself, she found herself wondering, How long should I stay here? Will it be decent to leave in ten minutes? Fifteen? Should I drop a flower, weep a tear, scratch a name on a stone?

She looked back at Tony. He was still sitting at the wheel of the car, his hat pulled down in front, so that the sun was kept from his eyes. He wasn’t watching her, but was staring incuriously across the empty fields. It occurred to Lucy that he had the air of a chauffeur waiting for his employer to come out of a shop, not caring what she was buying, how long she would stay, where the next stop would be, waiting with a remote, hired, unconnected patience, earning his salary, thinking of six o’clock, when he would be free to go his own way.

She walked over to the car. He turned his head toward her. “What a place to get killed,” he said.

Lucy didn’t answer him. She went around to the other side of the car, being careful not to slip into the ditch, and opened her bag, which was on the seat. She took out the Sergeant’s letter, and carefully removed it from its envelope. The paper was cracked and flaking with age at the edges and when she opened it she could see little holes along the creases.

“Here,” she said. “You might want to read this.”

Tony glanced at her suspiciously, the chauffeur wary of being involved unwillingly in the secrets of his employer. Then he took the letter, spreading it against the wheel, and began to read.

Lucy went around to the back of the car and leaned against the baggage rack. She didn’t want to watch Tony reading the letter. She didn’t want him to feel that it was necessary to put any kind of expression on his face for her, pity or amusement at the Sergeant’s grammar or sorrow for the event of the distant afternoon. She became conscious of the silence, so different from the crowded music of the American countryside, and she realized that she missed the sound of birds. That’s right, she remembered, the French shoot everything, the birds are dead or they have learned to keep quiet.

She heard Tony rustling the letter, putting it back in the envelope, and she turned around. He was being very careful with the frail paper and tucking the edges in neatly. He tapped the envelope reflectively against the steering wheel several times, then sat still, staring out at the road. Then he climbed out of the car, putting the letter in his pocket. He went out into the middle of the road and stopped, scuffing the dust with his shoe.

“Making mistakes right up to the last minute, wasn’t he?” Tony said, pushing the dust, smoothing it out with the sole of his shoe. “Always so sure people were going to surrender.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Tony shrugged. “What do you want me to say? Should I make a speech about our heroic dead? He was just taking a walk.” He came back toward her. “He should have stayed back at Corps, as the Sergeant said.”

“The Sergeant didn’t say that.”

Tony shrugged again, impatiently. “He intimated as much. All the others—the sensible ones—stayed there. They weren’t fearless and cheerful and democratic …” Tony grinned harshly. “And they’re back home today.”

He swung around and looked at the crossroads. Then he bent into the back of the car, under the lowered canvas top, and felt around for a moment and came up with a thin, jointed jack handle. He straightened it out and locked the joint. It had a curved end and now it looked like a cane in his hands. He leaned over again and he came up this time with a bottle in a straw jacket. He took the jacket off and Lucy saw that it was a bottle of brandy, still sealed.

“For cold nights and thirsty travelers,” Tony said, tossing the straw jacket into the ditch, and holding up the bottle. “Do you happen to have a corkscrew on you?”

“No.” Lucy watched him, puzzled and suspicious.

“That’s a mistake,” he said. “One should not be caught out in France without a corkscrew.” He went to the middle of the road and stared down at the surface. Then, with the jack handle, he began to write in the dust, slowly and carefully. Curiously, Lucy came up behind him to see what he was doing.

Oliver Crown, he was printing in the dust in wide, evenly spaced letters. Husband. Father. He hesitated, the jack handle poised. Then he added one more word. Negotiator, he wrote. When he had finished that, he stepped back a little, cocking his head to one side, like an artist criticizing his own work. Then he stepped up again and drew a box around the inscription. “That’s better,” he said. He went over to the side of the road and bent down and knocked off the head of the brandy bottle against a stone and came back and carefully poured brandy, in a series of little spurts, along the lines of the letters.

“To make it stand out,” Tony said, “for all the world to see.”

The brandy smelled strong and sweetish in the heat and when Tony had finished with the letters he had enough left over for the frame. For a moment, the memorial looked permanent and sensible, darkly outlined in the glittering dust.

When he finished, Tony straightened up. He looked at Lucy, his face strange, sad, pulled into a tortured grimace. “Something had to be done,” he said, standing there with the jagged-throated bottle in his hand.

Then Lucy heard the sound of footsteps, many footsteps, shuffling in a rough irregular rhythm, growing stronger and stronger. She looked up. Over the edge of the rise a banner was showing, small and triangular, carried on a staff. A second later, uniformed men appeared over the rise, marching in a column of twos, coming out of the shade of the trees, moving swiftly. Lucy blinked. I’m imagining things, she thought, they stopped marching a long time ago.

The columns came closer and then she began to laugh. The uniformed men coming sweatily over the rise, with their banner before them, were boy scouts, in khaki shirts and shorts and packs, led by a scout master in a beret. Lucy went over and leaned against the car and laughed uncontrollably.

“What’s the matter?” Tony followed her and peered at her closely. “What’re you laughing about?”

She stopped. She stared at the approaching columns. “I don’t know,” she said.

She and Tony stood against the car, off to one side, as the boys came up. They were between thirteen and sixteen, red-faced and thin, long-haired and knobby-kneed and serious under their packs. They looked like the sons of barbers and musicians. Without paying any attention to what was under their feet, they marched over the inscription in the dust, on which the brandy had already dried. They raised a small cloud as they passed and their boots and stockings were powdery gray. They stared admiringly from their sweating, unformed faces at the pretty little car and smiled gravely at the foreigners. The scout master saluted solemnly and said “Bonjour” and looked curiously at the bottle in Tony’s hand.

Tony said “Bonjour,” and all the boys answered him in chorus, their voices high and choirlike over the scuffling sound of their boots on the road.

They marched purposefully against the walls of the town and after they had gone a little distance down the straight white road, they were no longer children, but soldiers again, weary and lonely in the hot sun, but determined and potent under their packs, with their banner in the van. Tony and Lucy stood silently watching them until they disappeared into the town, which received them in silence.

Then Tony tossed the bottle away, into the hedge.

“Well,” he said, “I guess we’re through here.”

“Yes,” said Lucy. In utter weariness, her feet shuffling through the dust, she started back toward the passenger’s side of the car. There were some loose rocks on the edge of the ditch and her high heel turned on one of them and she stumbled and fell, heavily, on her hands and knees, into the dust of the road. Stunned, feeling the pain begin in her knees and the palms of her hands, and the shock spreading dully up her spine and in her brain, she stayed that way, her hair hanging down over her eyes, panting, like an overburdened and exhausted animal.

For a moment, Tony looked down incredulously at his mother, awkward and in pain, fallen at his feet. Then he bent forward and put his hand on her shoulder to pick her up.

“Let go of me,” she said harshly, not looking at him, her head still down.

He stepped back, listening to the dry, tearless sobbing of her breath. After a while she put out her hand to the car bumper and slowly and heavily pulled herself up. Her palms were bleeding and she rubbed them on her dress, leaving dusty red smears on it. Her stockings were torn and a little blood was seeping from the broken skin of her knees. She pushed at herself with blind, clumsy movements of her hands, and suddenly she seemed old, bereaved, pitiable, struggling to hold on to the last remnants of her courage and endurance.

He made no move to help her, but kept staring at her, his face set, as the new image of his mother, bloody, vulnerable, stained with dust, took possession of him. Watching her straightening her dress with ungainly, sexless, un-womanish movements, and bending over heavily to scrape the blood off her knees, he had a vision of her old age and her death, and remembered, in a wave of pity for them both, the night he had slept out under the stars on the glider on the porch and had listened to the owl and had decided to become a doctor and invent a serum against mortality. His eyes blurring with tears, he heard again the owl’s call, and remembered the deathless monkey, and his selection of candidates for everlasting life, his mother, his father, Jeff, himself. And somehow, in the confusion of memory and the final overrunning of long-held defenses, it was not only himself in the glider, but his son, too, magically thirteen, and his twin, dispensing immortality in accordance with the stern rules of love and watching his mother, light-footed, soft-voiced, cherished, coming across the misty lawn from her lover’s bed to kiss him good night.

He went slowly over to her and took her hands, one after the other, and carefully brushed the dirt from the wounds. Then he pushed her hair back from her forehead and with his handkerchief wiped the sweat from her drawn and aging face. Then he led her to the car door and helped her in. He stood over her briefly, as she looked up at him, the pain draining out of her eyes.

He touched her cheek lightly with his fingertips, as she had touched him so often when he was a boy, and said, “There’s no need to go to the grave any more, is there?”

He could feel her skin tremble minutely under his fingers. She shook her head gratefully. “No,” she said.

It was nearly midnight when they got back to Paris, and Tony drove directly to his mother’s hotel. He helped her out of the car and walked with her to the hotel entrance. They stopped there, oppressed by the difficulty of saying good-bye.

“Tony,” Lucy said, “I’m only going to be here another day. I wonder if I might come by your apartment tomorrow some time. I’d like to give your son something. A toy.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Don’t think you have to be there, Tony,” she said anxiously. “It’s not necessary.”

“I know,” he said.

“Good,” she said quickly. “I’ll come in the afternoon. What time does he get up from his nap?”

“Three o’clock, I think.”

“I’ll be there at three o’clock,” she said.

Then he knew he couldn’t leave her like that. With a smothered, childish cry, he threw his arms around her and held her tight, feeling the years, with their weight of memory and error, lift convulsively from his shoulders as he clung to her, forgiving her, mutely asking for forgiveness for himself, clutching at her, clutching at whatever might be left to them in the waste of love they had made around them.

She held him to her consolingly, patting his arm, oblivious of the people who passed them curiously on the dark, foreign street.

“Mother,” he said, “do you remember—when I went off at the end of that summer and I asked you what we would say if we happened to see each other—do you remember what you said?”

Lucy nodded, remembering the quiet afternoon and the dark autumn blue of the mountain lake and the boy in the suit that had grown too small for him in the summer. “I said, I guess we say hello.”

Tony pulled gently back from his mother’s embrace and stared into her eyes. “Hello,” he said gravely, “Hello, hello.”

Then they smiled at each other and they were like any other mother and grown son placidly parting after a day in the country.

Lucy looked down at her torn and rumpled dress, at her ripped stockings and scarred knees. “My,” she said, “what a sight! God only knows what the people in the hotel will think I’ve been up to today.” She laughed. Then she leaned over and kissed him matter-of-factly on the cheek, as though she had been kissing him good night every night for twenty years. “Sleep well,” she said, and turned and went into the hotel.

He watched her for a moment, going through the lobby toward the desk, a tall, heavy woman, lonely and showing her age, solid and reconciled and without illusions about herself. Then he got into the car and drove home.

The apartment was dark when he let himself in and he went into the child’s room and stood over his bed, listening to the steady breathing. After a moment or two, the boy awoke and sat up.

“Daddy,” he said.

“I just came in to say good night,” Tony said. “I just left your grandmother and she’s coming here tomorrow to see you after your nap.”

“After my nap,” the boy said drowsily, fixing it against the forgetfulness of sleep.

“She’s going to bring you a toy,” Tony said, whispering in the dark room.

“I want a tractor,” the boy said. “No, a boat.”

“I’ll call her in the morning,” Tony said, “and she’ll bring you a boat.”

“A big boat,” the boy said, lying back on his pillow. “For long voyages.”

Tony nodded over the bed. “A big boat for many long voyages,” he said.

But the boy was already asleep.

Tony went into the bedroom he shared with his wife. Dora was sleeping, too, on her back, breathing steadily, her head thrown back and her two hands up in front of her face, as though she were defending herself. Tony undressed quietly in the darkness and slipped into bed. He lay still for a few moments, thinking, Another day in my life.

Then he turned on his side and gently drew his wife’s hands down from her face and took her in his arms and slept.