Lucy Crown

4

SITTING BESIDE OLIVER IN the sedate Buick as they drove through the white Vermont towns, Patterson settled back comfortably in the front seat, pleased with everything, pleased with the neat, efficient way Oliver drove, pleased with the weather, with the week-end, with the memory of Mrs. Wales, with his friendship with the Crowns, with the recovery of Tony, pleased with the image of Lucy, barelegged, with her white sweater loose over her bathing suit, stopping in the sunlight, leaning on Oliver’s shoulder, to shake out a pebble that had been caught between her toes and the sole of her wooden clog.

He looked across at Oliver, sitting easily at the wheel, his face severe and intelligent, modified subtly by that touch of useless daring, that obsolete and almost military recklessness that Patterson had remarked when they were drinking their whiskies on the lawn. God, thought Patterson, if he were interested in other women, it would be a holy parade! If I looked like that … He grinned inwardly. He half-closed his eyes, and thought again of Lucy, caught in the sunlight, on the path up from the lake, her hair falling loose over her face as she bent over her bare, long leg.

Well, he thought, if I were married to Lucy Crown I wouldn’t look at anyone else, either.

Sometimes, when he had drunk too much or was feeling sad, he told himself that if he had permitted it, he would have fallen in love with Lucy Crown, who at that time was Lucy Hammond, the first evening he saw her, a month before she married Oliver. And there had been one night, at a dance at the country club, when he nearly had told her so. Or perhaps he had told her so. It had been confused and quick and the band was playing loudly, and Lucy had been in his arms one moment and out of them the next and there had been no doubt about it, that night he had drunk too much.

The first time Patterson had met Lucy was in the early 1920s, when Oliver brought her back to Hartford to introduce her to his family. Patterson was older than Oliver and had already been married more than a year and had just begun to practice in Hartford. The Crowns had lived in Hartford for four generations and old man Crown had a printing business that had come down in the family and had kept the Crowns comfortably rich for fifty years. There were two daughters in the family, both older than Oliver and already married, and there had been a brother who had been killed in a plane accident during the war. Oliver had trained to be a pilot, too, but had arrived in France very late and had never flown in combat.

After the war and after France, Oliver had settled in New York and started a small, experimental airplane business with two other veterans. Old man Crown had put up Oliver’s share of the money, and the three young men had set up a factory near Jersey City and some years they almost broke even.

Patterson had known Oliver ever since Oliver had been a freshman trying to make the baseball team when Patterson was a senior in high school. Even then, when Oliver couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, Patterson had envied the tall, mannerly boy the dignity and quiet self-assurance with which he conducted himself and the ease with which he came off with the highest marks in his class, made all the teams and attracted the prettiest girls in the school. After that, Patterson envied him the war, envied him France, New York, the airplane business, the large, drunken gay young men who were his partners, and when he met Lucy, he envied him Lucy. If anyone had asked either Patterson or Crown about their relationship, they would both have said, unhesitatingly, that they were each other’s best friends. Crown, as far as Patterson could tell, envied no one anything.

Lucy at that time was about twenty years old, and from the moment Oliver introduced her, Patterson began to feel a vague and sorrowful sense of loss. She was a tall girl with soft blond hair and wide gray, speckled eyes. There was something curiously Oriental about her face. The nose was flat and very straight and the bridge blended smoothly into her broad, low forehead. There was the hint of a slant about her eyes, and her upper lip turned up strangely in a flat plane and seemed to be cut off squarely and abruptly at the corners. In trying to describe her long after he knew her, Patterson said that she looked as though she came from a family of blondes among whom had slipped, secretly, and perhaps only for one night, a Balinese dancing-girl grandmother. Lucy had a full, hesitant mouth and a breathy, low, slightly disconnected way of talking, as though she never was sure that people were willing to listen to what she had to say. Her clothes were never quite stylish, but since the style that year was so hideous, that was all to the good. She seemed to be aiming at immobility, especially with her hands, keeping them folded in her lap when she was seated, and straight at her sides, like a polite and well-schooled child, when she stood. Her father and mother were dead, and she had no family except for a shadowy aunt in Chicago, of whom Patterson never found out more than that she was the same size as Lucy and sent her disastrous clothes when she had finished with them. When he was considerably older and given more closely to reflection, Patterson realized that the slightly bizarre dowdiness that her aunt’s clothes lent to Lucy gave her an added attraction, by making her different from the other girls around her, none of whom were as beautiful as she, and by introducing a warm, protective note of pity for her poverty and her youthful awkwardness.

Lucy was working then as an assistant to a research biologist at Columbia University, who was, according to Oliver, deeply involved with single-celled marine plants. It was an unlikely thing for a girl who looked like that to be doing, and what was more unlikely, she had made it plain to Oliver that she intended to continue, marriage or no marriage, and take her Ph.D. and try to get a job as an instructor, with research projects of her own. Oliver had been tolerantly amused at the idea of having a wife who was so stubbornly scientific and who messed around all day long with what he insisted upon calling algae, but as long as she looked the way she did, and as long as it meant that she stayed in New York with him, for the moment he made no protest.

As far as Patterson could tell, they were very much in love with each other, although Lucy was modest and undemonstrative in public, again the polite child into whom it has been drilled that it is bad manners to draw attention to oneself. As for Oliver, he had always been humorously offhand and reserved, an attitude which had been intensified by the rituals of the pilots among whom he had been thrown, and it was only because Patterson knew him so well that he could see in the way he behaved toward Lucy a steady tenderness and delight.

All in all, they were tall, shining, innocent young people, and if, later on, looking back at it, it had turned out that they had not been as shining as all that, seeing them standing gravely together at the altar (in New York—Oliver said he didn’t want to blight his marriage by starting it off in Hartford) made Patterson feel that of all the marriages taking place on that June day in the nation, this certainly must be numbered among the fairest.

At the reception, at which Patterson got a little drunk on the champagne that old man Crown had put away before Prohibition, Patterson had said, looking a little maliciously around the room, “This is a damned peculiar wedding. There isn’t a guest here who has slept with the bride.” The people who heard him laughed, and it added to his reputation as a wit and as a man in whom it was dangerous to confide too much.

When Patterson took the train home for Hartford the next day, with Catherine, his wife, he sat, leaning against the window, conscious of his head, and conscious, too, that his own marriage, now thirteen months old, was a mistake. There was nothing to be done about it, and it wasn’t Catherine’s fault, and Patterson knew that he wasn’t going to do anything about it, and that he was going to make Catherine suffer as little as possible from it. Sitting there, closing his eyes against the last fumes of the wedding champagne, he knew that it was going to be a long, quiet, submerged mistake. At that period he was a cynic and a pessimist, and he felt that it was quite normal to realize, about the age of twenty-seven, that you had made a mistake that you would have to live with for the rest of your life.

When they got back from their honeymoon, Oliver and Lucy Crown lived, for a while, exactly as they had planned. They had an apartment on Murray Hill, with a large living room, which, more often than not, was full of the kind of ambitious young people who were flooding into New York at the time. Oliver went every morning to the little factory outside Jersey City and crashed occasionally in meadows and salt flats in the planes that he and his partners manufactured and Lucy took the subway five days a week to the laboratory and the algae on Morningside Heights and came home to make dinner or give a party or go to the theatre, or, more rarely, to work on the thesis she was preparing for her Ph.D. She no longer wore her aunt’s clothes, but it turned out that her own taste was uncertain, or perhaps deliberately plain, out of some adolescent concept of modesty, and she never really looked as though she belonged in New York.

Patterson came to the city as often as he could. He came without Catherine when he could manage it, and always made the Crown apartment his headquarters, adding to the long list of things he envied Oliver Crown, the place he lived in and the friends he saw. It occurred to Patterson at that time that although Lucy looked quietly happy, she seemed almost to be visiting the marriage rather than being a full partner in it. This was in some measure due to her shyness, which had not yet left her, and Oliver’s quality of dominating and directing, cheerfully, politely, without effort and often without desiring it, whatever company he was in.

After one of Patterson’s visits to New York, Catherine asked him if he thought Lucy was happy. Patterson hesitated, and then said, “Yes, I think so. Or almost happy. But she expects to be happier later on …”

Oliver’s father drowned off Watch Hill and Lucy gave birth to a son in the same year. Oliver went up to Hartford, looked at the books of the printing company, talked to his mother and the plant manager, then came home and told Lucy to start packing. They were going to have to live in Hartford, for a long time. Whatever regrets he had about giving up the airplane business, and giving up New York, he swallowed on the trip back in the train and never mentioned them either to Lucy or to Patterson, or, as far as Patterson knew, to anyone else. Lucy packed the notes that she had collected for the thesis that she was never going to write, had a farewell lunch with the researcher in single-celled marine life, closed the apartment and followed her husband to the big Crown house in Hartford in which he had been born and in which he had grown up and which he had tried, for so long, to leave.

Selfishly, Patterson was pleased to have Lucy and Oliver living just a half-dozen streets away from him. They were a center of gayety and life in a way that Patterson and his wife never could be, and in his role of old friend and then family doctor, Patterson was in and out of the house three or four times a week, sharing impromptu meals, invited to all parties, acting not only as a doctor to the little boy, but appointed uncle, the recipient of confidences, giver of advice (to Lucy only; Oliver never asked anyone for advice), planner of vacations and week-ends, bridge partner and privileged philosopher around the family fire. The Crown house became the center for a good many of the more attractive younger married people of the city, and it was at their dinner table that Patterson met, in different years, two pretty ladies with whom he later had affairs.

Whether Oliver and Lucy knew about the two ladies or about the other liaisons, secret and not so secret, that were inevitable in a circle like that in the 1920s and early 1930s, Patterson never knew. Neither of them gossiped or encouraged gossip and neither of them, in all that time, ever showed, for a moment, any interest in anybody else. It was a little surprising in Oliver, who before his marriage had been an easy and equal companion to the pilots and other jovial thugs with whom he had come out of the war. But with each passing year, he seemed to become more singly and happily devoted to his wife, not sentimentally or cloyingly, but with a frank gift of virility and confidence that made Patterson’s marriage, when he thought of it, which was as seldom as possible, seem barren and without purpose.

As for Lucy, the move to a smaller city and the preoccupation with the child made her seem more adult and at ease, and it was only at rare moments, at big parties, when Oliver would be, as usual, the center of a group and she found herself half-neglected in a corner, that the old impression that Patterson had had of her—that she was a visitor to the marriage, not a half-owner of it, would occur to him again.

They only had the one child. Tony was a bright and handsome little boy with very good manners, whose only disability from being an only child seemed to be a too nervous attachment to his mother. When Lucy was not in the house when he came home from school, or was late in returning from shopping, the boy developed the habit of waiting for her, sitting on her bed, and calling, on the bedside telephone table, the various friends at whose houses he felt his mother might be found. His grave, soft voice, saying, “Hello, this is Tony Crown. I wonder if my mother happens to be with you. Thank you. No, there’s no emergency,” became familiar over the telephones of ten different houses. Oliver, who, naturally, was displeased with the habit, spoke of him, half-fondly, half-annoyed, as “The Caller.”

As Patterson pointed out, there was nothing wrong with the little boy that a few brothers and sisters wouldn’t cure, but for some reason Lucy never conceived again, and by the time Tony was ten, the Crowns had given up hope o£ ever having any more children.

Those years Patterson was to regard as being the best of his life. The reason for that was not of course only the Crowns, or even primarily the Crowns. It was in that period that Patterson was establishing himself and prospering and feeling horizons opening out steadily ahead of him. But the background of the home of the Crowns, with its open door, its easy freedom, with the friendship of Oliver, and the shy warmth of Lucy and the devotion of the little boy, doubly valuable since he was himself childless, made a brightly colored setting to Patterson’s other successes that he could find nowhere else. And the feeling that he had toward Lucy, which at one time or another he described, but only to himself, and then only with a little laugh, as love, gave a new flicker of expectation and secret pleasure to him whenever he stood at their door and pressed the bell.

Sitting in the Buick, moving through the late Sunday traffic at a comfortable fifty miles an hour, he looked across again at Oliver. I wonder what he would say, Patterson thought wryly, if he knew what I was thinking at this moment. What a marvelous thing it is that we can’t read our friends’ minds.

“Sam …” Oliver said, without taking his eyes off the road.

“Yes?”

“Do you think you can get up to the lake again during the summer?”

“I’m going to try,” Patterson said.

“Will you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Leave Mrs. Wales home,” Oliver said.

“What in the world are you talking about …” Patterson began, with what he thought was an accurate imitation of surprise.

Oliver smiled at the wheel. “Now, Sam …” he said mildly.

Patterson laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Farewell, Mrs. Wales.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Oliver said. “But Lucy fired a shot.”

“Lucy,” Patterson said. “Oh.” He felt a warm flush of embarrassment and he knew, instantaneously, that he wasn’t going to come up to the lake again that summer, with or without Mrs. Wales.

“The wives’ benevolent association,” Oliver said, “protecting the other members.”

They drove without speaking for a few more miles. Then Oliver spoke again. “Sam, what did you think of that boy? Bunner?”

“Okay,” Patterson said. “I think he’ll be good for Tony.”

“If he lasts,” Oliver said.

“What do you mean?”

“Lucy’ll make his life hell.” Oliver chuckled. “I bet a week from now I get a letter saying he nearly let Tony drown or he taught him a dirty word and she had to fire him.” Oliver shook his head. “God, bringing up an only child is a touchy job. And a sick boy, to boot. Sometimes I look at him and a shiver goes over me when I think of the way he’s liable to turn out.”

“He’ll turn out all right,” Patterson said, defending Tony, but believing it, too. “You’re too nervous.”

Oliver only grunted an answer.

“What do you want?” Patterson demanded. “Do you want a guarantee that he’ll be elected governor of the state or win the heavyweight championship of the world? What do you want him to do?”

Oliver hunched thoughtfully over the wheel. “Well,” he said, slowing the car down a bit, “I don’t want him to do anything particularly.” Then he grinned. “I just want him to turn out lucky.”

“Don’t worry,” Patterson said. “With his mother and father, he’ll be lucky. It runs in the family.”

Oliver smiled, and Patterson was sure that there was irony and bitterness in the smile. “I’m glad you think so,” Oliver said.

Well, what do you know about that, Patterson thought, suddenly remembering the intuition he had had on the lawn several hours before, that Oliver was a disappointed man. With everything he has, he doesn’t think he’s lucky. What the hell does he expect out of this life?