Lucy Crown

6

“NOW LOOK, LUCY, YOU must remember where you put it,” Oliver was saying over the phone, his voice loaded with the weary patience which Lucy knew so well and which always froze her into a state of near-amnesia, because she knew what exasperated impatience it disguised. “Think hard.”

“I am thinking hard,” Lucy said, and she knew she sounded sullen and childish, but she couldn’t help it. “I’m sure I left all the bills in my desk.”

She was standing in the living room in the cottage as she spoke, watching Tony and Jeff playing chess under the light of a lamp at the big table in the middle of the room. Both of them were concentrating, heads close together over the board, Tony because he was determined to win and Jeff because he was being polite and did not want to seem to be listening to the conversation on the phone being conducted six feet away from him.

“Lucy, darling,” Oliver’s voice now compounded both the weariness and the patience, “I’ve looked twice in your desk. It’s not there. You’ve got bills from 1932 there and recipes for fish soup and an invitation to the wedding of two people who were divorced three years ago—but the bill from the garage is not there. I repeat,” he said slowly, in that maddening voice, “the bill for the garage is not there.”

She felt like crying. Whenever Oliver got after her for the inefficiency with which she ran the household accounts, she had a flustered, tragic sense that the modern world was too complicated for her, that unknown people came into her room when she was absent and maliciously rifled her papers, that Oliver was sure she was an idiot and regretted marrying her. If Tony and Jeff hadn’t been there she would have cried, which would have had the advantage of making Oliver relent and say, “The hell with it. It isn’t that important. I’ll straighten it out somehow.”

But even though neither Tony nor Jeff was watching her she couldn’t cry, of course. All she could say was, “I’m sure I paid it. I’m absolutely sure.”

“Jenkins says no,” Oliver said. Jenkins was the owner of the garage and Lucy despised him because he had a trick of turning from the warmest affability to whining protest when people made him wait for his money past the fifth of the month.

“Whose word are you going to take?” Lucy asked. “Jenkins’ or mine?”

“Well, it’s not in the checkbook,” Oliver said, and she could have screamed at the thin, distant persistence of the voice on the phone, “and I can’t find the receipted bill and he was most obnoxious about it today when I stopped in for gas. It’s very embarrassing, Lucy, to have a man come up to you and say you’ve owed him seventy dollars for three months, when you’ve thought you’ve paid it.”

“We have paid it,” Lucy said stubbornly, not remembering anything.

“Lucy, I repeat,” Oliver said, “we must have the bill.”

“What do you want me to do?” she cried, her voice rising, despite herself. “Come down and look for it myself? If that’s what you want, I’ll take the train tomorrow morning.”

Jeff looked up quickly at this, then returned to the game.

“Guard your queen,” he said to Tony.

“I have a deadly plan,” Tony said. “Watch.”

“No, no,” Oliver said wearily. “I’ll talk to him myself. Forget it.”

When he said, Forget it, Lucy knew that it was a sentence on her, a small, recurrent, punitive, mounting sentence.

“How are things up there?” Oliver asked, but coolly, disciplining her. “How’s Tony?”

“He’s playing chess with Jeff,” said Lucy. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Yes, please.”

Lucy put the phone down. “Your father wants to talk to you, Tony,” she said. She started out of the room, as Tony said, “Hi, Dad.”

She was conscious that Jeff was watching her as she went out onto the porch and she had a feeling that she looked tense and humiliated.

“We saw a deer today,” Tony was saying. “He came down to the lake to drink.”

Lucy moved off across the lawn toward the shore of the lake because she didn’t want to have to talk to Oliver again. The moon was full and it was a warm night and a slight milky mist was rising from the water. From the opposite shore came the sound of the bugle. Every night after taps at the camp there, the bugler gave a short concert. Tonight he was playing French cavalry calls, very well, and the strange, quick music made the whole scene, with the borders of the lake softened and almost obscured by the rising mist, seem unfamiliar and melancholy.

Lucy stood there, holding her bare arms because of the little chill along the edge of the water, allowing her irritation to be soothed by the moonlight and the bugle calls into self-pity.

She heard the steps behind her, but she didn’t turn around and when Jeff put his arms around her she had the feeling not of a woman being pursued by a young man, but of a child taken under mature protection. And when she turned around and he kissed her, although it soon changed into something else, she had the feeling that she had been bruised and that her hurt was being assuaged. She felt his hands, smooth and hard, on the bare flesh of her back, gentle, searching, demanding. She pulled her head away and, still embraced, put her face against his shoulder.

“Oh, Lord …” Jeff whispered. He put his hand under her chin and tried to pull her head up, but she resisted and pushed deeper into the loose flannel of his shirt.

“No,” she said. “No. No more …”

“Later,” he whispered. “I have the house all to myself. My sister’s in town for the week.”

“Stop it.”

“I’ve been so good,” Jeff said. “I can’t any more. Lucy …”

“Mother …” It was Tony’s voice, high and childish, carrying across the lawn from the house. “Mother …”

Lucy broke away and hurried across the lawn.

“Yes, Tony,” she called, as she reached the porch.

“Daddy wants to know if you want to talk to him again.”

Lucy stopped and leaned against the pillar of the porch, trying to breathe properly. “Not unless he has something he particularly wants to say to me,” she said, through the open window.

“Mother says only if you have something you particularly want to say to her,” Tony said into the phone.

She waited. There was silence for a moment and then Tony said, “Okay. I will. So long,” and she heard the click of the phone as he hung up. He poked his head out through the window, lifting the screen.

“Mother,” he called.

“I’m here,” she said, from the shadows of the porch.

“Daddy said to tell you he can’t come up this week-end,” he said. “There’s a man coming in from Detroit he has to see.”

“All right, Tony,” she said, watching Jeff coming slowly through the moonlight across the lawn toward the house. “Now, if you’re going to sleep out here, you’d better start getting your bed ready.”

“We haven’t finished the chess game yet,” Tony said. “I have him in a gruesome position.”

“Finish it tomorrow,” said Lucy. “You’ll still have him in a gruesome position.”

“Righteo,” Tony said, and pulled his head inside the house, letting the screen fall with a bang.

Jeff came onto the porch and stood in front of her. He started to put out his arms toward her, but she moved off and switched on the lamp that stood on the rattan table near the big glider on which Tony was going to sleep.

“Lucy,” Jeff whispered, following her. “Don’t run away.”

“It didn’t happen,” she said. Nervously, she pushed one of Tony’s shirts, on which she had been sewing buttons that afternoon, into a sewing basket that was on the table. “Nothing happened. Forget it. I beg you. Forget it.”

“Never,” he said, standing close to her. He put out his hand and touched her mouth. “Your lips …”

She heard herself moan and even as the sound came from her she was surprised at it. She had the feeling that she was losing control of the simplest mechanical gestures, the movement of her arms, the voice in her throat. “No,” she said and pushed past Jeff, scraping harshly at her mouth with the back of her hand.

Tony came out, loaded with bedclothes, and dumped them on the glider. “Listen, Jeff,” he said. “You’re not to study the board until tomorrow morning.”

“What? What’s that?” Jeff turned slowly toward the boy.

“No unfair advantages,” Tony said. “You promise?”

“I promise,” Jeff said. He smiled stiffly at Tony, then bent over and picked up Tony’s telescope, which was lying under a chair, and seemed to become absorbed in polishing the lens with the sleeve of his shirt.

Lucy watched Tony as he began to arrange the sheets and the blankets on the glider. “You’re sure you want to sleep out here tonight?” she asked, thinking, I will be motherly, that will bring me back. “You won’t be too cold?”

“It’s not cold,” Tony said cheerfully. “Millions of people sleep out in the summertime, don’t they, Jeff?”

“Millions,” Jeff said, still polishing the lens of the telescope. He was seated now and he was bent over and Lucy couldn’t see his face.

“Soldiers, hunters, mountain climbers,” said Tony. “I’m going to write Daddy and ask him to bring me a sleeping bag. Then I can sleep out in the snow, too.”

“You’ll have plenty of time for that,” Jeff said. He stood up and Lucy, watching him, saw that his face was quiet, unchanged, and that his expression was once more the usual one of friendly and skeptical indulgence that he displayed to Tony.

I have to be careful of him, Lucy thought. He is too resilient for me. It is not only the waists of young men that are flexible.

“Plenty of time, Tony,” Jeff said carelessly. “In World War Twelve.”

“That isn’t funny,” Lucy said sharply. She went over and started helping Tony make up the glider for the night.

“Pardon,” Jeff said. “World War Fifteen.”

“Don’t be sore at him, Mummy,” Tony said. “We have a deal. He talks to me just as though I was twenty years old.”

“There won’t be any World War Twelve or Fifteen or World War Anything,” Lucy said. She was frightened of the idea of war and she refused to read any of the news from Spain, where the Civil War had been going on for a year, and she had successfully prevented Oliver from buying tin soldiers or air-rifles for Tony when he was younger. Actually, she would not have been so touchy on the subject if somehow she could have been guaranteed that whatever war took place would come at a time when Tony was either too young or too old to be involved in it. If she had been forced to state her position she would have said that patriotism was only for people with large families. “Talk about something else,” she said.

“Talk about something else, Tony,” Jeff said obediently.

“Did you look at the moon tonight, Jeff?” Tony asked. “It’s nearly full. You can see just about everything.”

“The moon,” said Jeff. He lay down on his back on the floor of the porch and took one of the wooden chairs and up-ended it, holding it steady between his knees. He used the crossbar as a rest for the telescope and squinted off into the sky.

“What’re you doing there?” Lucy asked, almost suspiciously.

“Tony showed me this,” Jeff said, adjusting the telescope. “You’ve got to have a steady field, don’t you, Tony?”

“Otherwise,” Tony said, working busily on the glider, “the stars blur.”

“And one thing, we won’t have around here,” said Jeff, “is blurred stars.” He made a final quarter turn on the tube. “Consider the unblurred moon,” he said professorially. “An interesting place to visit, if you like traveling. Sail on a stone boat across the Mare Crisium … In English, Tony?”

“Sea of Crises,” Tony said automatically.

“Crises,” Jeff said. “Even on the cold, dead moon.”

He couldn’t have meant what he said before, Lucy thought resentfully, he was just trying it on, if he can play like this with Tony now.

“And to the south,” Jeff was saying, “a more pleasant place. The Mare Foecunditas.”

“The Sea of Fertility,” Tony said promptly.

“We will dip you in that two or three times, just to make sure.” Jeff grinned, lying there on his back, with the telescope pointed toward the stars.

“Jeff,” Lucy said, warningly.

“The Sea of Tranquility, the Marsh of Sleep, the Lake of Dreams,” Jeff went on, as though he hadn’t heard her, his deep youthful voice with its pleasant, educated touch of Boston making a trance-like music out of the names. “Maybe the moon is the place to move to this century, after all. When were you born, Tony?”

“March twenty-sixth,” Tony said. He was making an elaborate hospital corner with the sheets and the blankets on the lower edge of the glider mattress.

“Aries,” Jeff said. He put the telescope down and lay with his head back on the wooden flooring of the porch. His eyes were closed now, as though he were searching for visions, listening to unworldly voices, waiting for omens from the heavens. “The sign of the Ram, the horned beast in the heavens. Do you know how the Ram got there, Tony?”

“Do you believe in that stuff?” Tony stopped his work on the bed for a moment and looked at Jeff.

“I believe in everything,” Jeff said, still with his eyes closed, his voice liturgical and solemn. “I believe in the Zodiac and luck and transmigration of souls and sacrifice and secret diplomacy, secretly arrived at.”

“Human sacrifice,” Tony said incredulously. “Did people ever really do that?”

“Of course,” Jeff said.

“Until when?” Tony asked skeptically.

“Until yesterday at three-fifteen P.M. It’s the only kind of sacrifice that ever does any good,” Jeff said. “Wait until you’ve tried it two or three times, Tony, and you’ll see what I mean.”

“All right, Jeff, that’s enough of that,” Lucy said, thinking, He’s deliberately provoking me, he’s revenging himself on me. “Tony, pay attention here.”

“Phrixus and Helle,” Jeff said, almost as if she hadn’t spoken, “sons of the King of Thessaly, were badly treated by their stepmother …”

“Is this educational?” Lucy said, determined to show nothing.

“Enormously,” Jeff said.

“What was her name?” Tony asked.

“Who?”

“The stepmother.”

“That’s in the next lesson,” Jeff said. “So Mercury took pity on the boys and sent a ram with golden fleece to help them escape. The ram carried them on his back, high above the earth and everything was going fine until they came to the strait that separates Europe from Asia. Then Helle fell and was drowned and they call the water the Hellespont to this day. And when Phrixus reached Colchis, which was a lively town when the weather was right, he sacrificed the ram in gratitude and Jupiter set the poor dead flying beast among the stars in recognition of his service to the king’s son …”

Lucy looked down curiously at Jeff. “Did you know all this before you met Tony?” she asked.

“Not a word,” Jeff said. “I go home and study every night so that Tony will think I’m the smartest man that ever lived.” He smiled. “I want him to be disappointed with every teacher he has from now on and get disgusted with education and never listen to any one of them again. It’s the least I can do for him.” He sat up suddenly, his face naïve and open, his eyes shining candidly in the light of the lamp. “Tony,” he said, “show your mother how you breathe when you swim.”

“Like this,” Tony said, ducking his head and making a swimming motion with his arms. “Kick, one, two, three, four, BREATHE!” He put his head to one side and opened his mouth wide at one corner, as though it was half in and half out of the water, and sucked in air with a loud, wet sound.

“Isn’t there a more gentlemanly way to breathe?” Lucy asked, thinking, The danger is over, everything is back to normal.

“No,” Jeff said, “I taught him that, too.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor now, he addressed Tony. “Do you think your father is getting his money’s worth out of me?”

“Well,” Tony said, teasing him, “almost.”

“Lie a little in your next letter,” Jeff said. “For friendship’s sake.” He stood up, picking up the telescope. He put the telescope to his eye and regarded Tony, at a distance of ten feet. “You will have to shave,” he said solemnly, “in exactly three years, two months, and fourteen days.”

Tony laughed and rubbed his chin.

“I have a question to ask you, young man.” Jeff came over to the glider and leaned against the chain, making it swing a little. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I went home with you after Labor Day and stayed with you this winter to smarten you up some more?”

“Do you think you could do that?” Lucy could see that Tony was deeply pleased with the idea.

“Don’t stop, Tony,” Lucy said sharply. “Jeff was joking. He has to go back to college and be sensible again until next summer. Stop swinging on the chain, please, Jeff, it’s hard enough to make this up as it is.”

“One thing I don’t like about summers,” Tony said, “toward the end, they go too fast. Will I really see you this winter, Jeff?”

“Of course,” Jeff said. “Get your mother to bring you up to Dartmouth. For the football games and the winter carnival.”

“Mother, do you think we can go?”

“Maybe,” Lucy said, because she didn’t want to make an issue of it. “If Jeff remembers to invite us.”

“Tomorrow, Tony,” said Jeff, “I’ll stab myself in the hand and print the invitation in blood and that constitutes a holy contract. We’ll pull wires and get your mother elected Queen of the Carnival and they’ll take her picture sitting on top of a snowball and everybody’ll say, ‘By gum, there’s never been anything like that in New Hampshire before.’”

Lucy glanced uneasily at Tony. If he were a year older, she thought, he would catch on. Maybe even now … “Stop it,” she said to Jeff, risking alerting Tony. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of you,” Jeff said slowly. He walked to the edge of the porch and looked once more at the sky through the telescope. “Mars,” he said, making his voice throaty and dramatic. “The low, baleful, red, unwinking planet. That’s your ruling planet, Tony, because you’re Aries. Favorable to slaughter and the arts of war. Become a soldier, Tony, and you’ll take a hundred towns and be at least a lieutenant colonel by the age of twenty-three.”

“Now, really, Jeff,” Lucy said, “that’s enough of that nonsense.”

“Nonsense?” Jeff said, sounding surprised. “Tony, do you think it’s nonsense?”

“Yes,” Tony said judiciously. “But it’s interesting.”

“People have been guiding their lives by the stars for five thousand years. The Kings of Egypt …” Jeff said. “Lucy,” and his voice was like a mischievous boy’s now, “when were you born?”

“A long time ago.”

“Tony, what’s your mother’s birthday?”

“August twenty-fifth.” Tony was enjoying this and he appealed to Lucy. “It can’t do any harm.”

“August twenty-fifth,” Jeff repeated. “The sign of Virgo. The Virgin …”

“Mother …” Tony looked inquiringly at Lucy.

“I’ll explain some other time.”

“In the region of the Euphrates,” Jeff went on, now pretending to be a lecturer and speaking rapidly and with no inflection, “it was identified with Venus, who was sad and perfect and was worshiped by lovers. The ruling planet is Mercury, the brightest star, which always keeps the same side turned to the sun and is frozen on one side and burning on the other. Virgoans are shy and fear to be brilliant …”

“Now,” said Lucy, feeling he had gone far enough, “where did you pick up all this foolishness?”

“Madame Vietcha’s Book of the Stars,” Jeff said, grinning. “Thirty-five cents at any good bookstore or at your druggist’s. Virgoans fear impurity and disorder and are liable to peptic ulcers. When they love, they love passionately and place a high premium on fidelity …”

“And how about you?” Lucy interrupted, almost with hostility, forgetting Tony for the instant, challenging Jeff. “What about your horoscope?”

“Aaah …” Jeff put the telescope down and wagged his head. “Mine is too sad to relate. I’m in opposition to my stars. They sit up there”—he waved sadly at the sky—“winking, defying me, saying, ‘Not a chance, not a chance …” I want to lead and they advise me to follow. I want to be brave and they say, Caution. I want to be great and they say, Perhaps in another life. I say, Love, and they say, Disaster. I’m a hero in the wrong twelfth of the Zodiac.”

There were footsteps on the gravel path alongside the porch and a moment later Lucy saw a young girl in blue jeans and a loose sweater come into view. For a moment Lucy didn’t recognize her, then saw that it was the daughter of a Mrs. Nickerson whom she had met at the hotel that afternoon. Tony halted work on the glider to stare at her.

“Hello,” the Nickerson girl said, coming onto the porch. She was a plump and prematurely developed girl and the blue jeans were stretched tight across her solid little behind. Her hair was streaked and Lucy noted disapprovingly that it had almost certainly been touched up. “Hello,” she repeated, standing with her legs widespread and her hands plunged into the pockets of the blue jeans. She looked around her with the unabashed self-possession of an animal trainer. “I’m Susan Nickerson,” she said, and if you closed your eyes you would have been sure it was a mature and rather unpleasant woman speaking. “We were introduced this afternoon.”

“Of course, Susan,” Lucy said. “This is my son Tony.”

“Delighted,” Susan said crisply. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.” Jeff made a face.

“My mother sent me over, Mrs. Crown,” Susan said, “to ask if you’d like to make a fourth at bridge tonight.”

Jeff glanced swiftly across at Lucy, then leaned over and picked up the chair that he had up-ended on the floor to observe the stars.

Lucy hesitated. She thought of the veranda of the hotel and the seared ranks of seasonal widows there. “Not tonight, Susan,” she said. “Tell your mother thank you, but I’m tired and I’m going to bed early.”

“Okay,” Susan said flatly.

“Bridge,” said Jeff, “has put this country further back than Prohibition.”

Susan inspected him coldly. She had bright, cold, blue, coin-like eyes. “I know about you,” she said. She had the trick of making the simplest statement sound like an accusation. It will come in very handy, Lucy thought, noticing it, if she later decides to become a policewoman.

Jeff laughed. “Maybe you’d better keep it to yourself, Susan,” he said.

“You’re the Dartmouth boy,” she said. “My mother thinks you’re very handsome.”

Jeff nodded gravely, agreeing. “And what do you think?” he asked.

“You’re all right.” She shrugged, a small, plump movement under the loose sweater. “They’d never take you in the movies, though.”

“I was afraid of that,” Jeff said. “And how long are you going to be here?”

“I hope not long,” the girl said. “I like Nevada better.”

“Why?” Jeff asked.

“There was more happening,” Susan said. “This place is dead. It’s got the wrong age groups. They don’t even have movies, except on Saturdays and week-ends. What do you do here at night?”

“We look at the stars,” said Tony, who had been watching her, fascinated.

“Ummn,” Susan said, not impressed.

She may be only fourteen years old, Lucy thought, repelled and amused at the same time, but she sounds as though only the most extreme forms of vice could hold her interest for more than five minutes at a time.

Tony went over to Susan and offered her the telescope. “You want to take a look?”

Susan shrugged again. “I don’t care.” But she took the telescope and put it languidly to her eye.

“You ever look through one of those before?” Tony asked.

“No,” Susan said.

“You can see the mountains of the moon with this one,” said Tony.

Susan looked critically and without favor at the moon.

“How do you like that?” Tony asked, the moon’s proprietor.

“It’s okay,” Susan said, returning the telescope. “It’s the moon.”

Jeff chuckled, shortly, once, and Susan raked him with her policewoman’s eyes. “Well,” she said, “I must be off. My mother will want to know about the bridge.” She raised her hand with terrible grace, as though dispensing a blessing. “Ta,” she said.

“See you tomorrow,” Tony said, and his effort to be nonchalant made Lucy feel she was going to break into a sweat in sympathy.

“Maybe,” Susan said wearily.

Poor Tony, Lucy thought. The first girl he’s ever looked at.

“Delighted to have made your acquaintance, everybody,” Susan said. “Ta, again.”

They watched her walk down the path, her buttocks like two solidly pumped-up beach balls under the tight cloth of the jeans.

Jeff shuddered elaborately as she disappeared around the corner of the house. “I bet her mother is something,” he said. “I’ll give you three guesses why that lady was in Nevada last summer.”

“Don’t gossip,” Lucy said. “Tony, stop lingering.”

Tony slowly came back to the adult world. “She looks funny in pants, doesn’t she? Kind of lumpy.”

“You’ll find they get lumpier and lumpier in pants as you go along, Tony,” Jeff said.

The moment, with its joke about sex, and the memory of the girl’s dry and effortless rejection of her son, made Lucy uncomfortable. Another night, she thought, resenting Jeff, and I would have laughed. Not tonight.

“Tony,” she said, “inside with you. Get into your pajamas. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

Tony slowly started in. “Jeff,” he said, “will you read to me when I get into bed?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll read to you tonight,” Lucy said, almost automatically.

“I like the way Jeff reads better.” Tony stopped at the door. “He skips the descriptions.”

“Jeff’s had a long day,” Lucy said, stubbornly, sorry that she had started this, but committed now. “He probably has a date or something.”

“No,” Jeff began, “I …”

“Anyway, Tony,” Lucy said, in a tone of sharp command she almost never used with him, “go in and get your pajamas on. Quickly.”

“All right,” Tony said, sounding hurt. “I didn’t mean …”

“Go ahead!” Lucy said, almost hysterically.

Puzzled, and a little frightened, Tony went into the house. Lucy moved quickly, in little jerky movements, around the porch, throwing some magazines together, closing the sewing basket, standing the telescope on the chair next to the glider, conscious that Jeff was watching her closely, humming tunelessly to himself.

She stopped in front of him. He was leaning against the porch pillar, his head in darkness, only a faint gleam showing where his eyes were.

“You,” she said. “I don’t like the way you behave with Tony.”

“With Tony?” Jeff straightened up, surprised, and came into the light of the lamp. “Why? I just behave naturally.”

“Nobody behaves naturally with children,” Lucy said, conscious that her voice was strained and artificial. “There is no such thing. All those sly jokes. All that pretense …”

“What pretense?”

“That you’re so fond of him,” Lucy said. “That you’re really just about the same age. That you want to see him again after the summer …”

“But I do,” Jeff said.

“Don’t lie to me. By Thanksgiving you won’t remember his name. And you’ll raise a lot of hopes in him … and all that it’ll mean to him is a long, disappointed autumn. Do your job,” she said. “And that’s all.”

“As I understood it,” Jeff said, “my job was to try to make him feel like a normal, healthy boy.”

“You’ve made him morbidly attached to you.”

“Now, Lucy …” Jeff said angrily.

“What for? Why?” She was almost shouting now. “Out of vanity? What’s so gratifying about getting a poor lonely little sick boy to cling to you? Why is it worth all the tricks? The Sign of the Ram, the Sea of Fecundity, human sacrifice, the Virgin, the Winter Carnival …” She was gasping, as though she had been running for a long time, and the words seemed to be pushed out past sobs. “Why don’t you go home? Why don’t you leave us both alone?”

Jeff took her arms and held them. She didn’t try to break away. “Is that what you want?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re the wrong age. You’re too old for him and you’re too young for me. Go find someone who’s twenty years old.” With a sharp movement, she pulled her arms out of his grasp. “Someone you can’t damage,” she said. “Someone for the summer. Someone you’ll forget in September just the way you’re going to forget us.”

“Lucy,” he whispered. “Stop it.”

“Go away.” She almost wept.

But he held her again, this time high up on her arms, close to her shoulders, his hands digging into her. “What do you think it’s been like for me?” he demanded, his voice still low, modified by the necessity of keeping Tony from hearing him. “Being so close to you, day after day? Going home and lying awake, remembering how your hand felt when I helped you out of the boat, remembering the sound your dress made as you brushed past me on the way down to dinner. Remembering what your laugh sounded like … And never being able to touch you, tell you … Damage!” he whispered harshly. “Don’t talk to me about damage!”

“Please,” she said, “if this is the way you talk to everybody, if this is the technique you’ve worked out, if this is how you’ve been successful with all your girls … spare me. Spare me.”

His hands tightened momentarily on her arms and she thought he was going to shake her. Then he let go of her. They stood there close to each other and he spoke wearily, without force. “You had a big straw hat last summer,” he said, his voice flat. “When you wore it in the sunlight, your face was all rosy and soft. Now, whenever I see a woman in a red straw hat like that, it’s as though someone has grabbed me by the throat …”

“Please,” Lucy said, “for the last time … go find yourself some other girl. There’re dozens of them. Young, unattached, who have no one to answer to when the summer is over.”

He stared at her, then nodded, as though agreeing. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “But you must promise not to laugh.”

“All right,” Lucy said, puzzled. “I won’t laugh.”

Jeff took a deep breath. “There are no other girls,” he said. “There never have been.”

Lucy lowered her head. She noticed that one of the middle buttons of her waist was undone. She closed it carefully. Then she began to laugh, helplessly.

“You promised,” Jeff said, hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her eyes, trying to control her mouth. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at myself.”

“Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“Because we’re both so clumsy,” she said. “Because we’re both so hopeless. Because neither of us knows how to do this.” Now she was looking at him squarely and soberly. “Because we’re going to do it,” she said.

They stood that way in silence for a second. Jeff made an uncertain movement with his hands. She took a step toward him and kissed him, hard.

“Lucy,” he whispered. He touched the back of her neck lightly with his hand.

“Now, little boy,” Lucy said, sounding motherly, almost jocular, pushing him away, “go to your nice, dark, empty sister’s house and sit on the porch and look at the moon and think of all the younger, prettier women you might have made love to tonight—and wait for me.”

Jeff made no move. “You … you’ll come there?” He asked warily, disturbed by her strange switch in attitude. “You’re not joking now? It’s not a trick?”

“It’s not a trick,” Lucy said lightly. “I’ll come along, never fear.”

Jeff tried to kiss her again, but she held him off, smiling, shaking her head. Then he wheeled and went quickly across the lawn, his shoes making no sound in the dewy grass. Lucy watched him disappear. Then she shook her head again and moved absently over to the glider. She was sitting there, her hands quiet in her lap, looking out at the misted lake, when Tony came out a few minutes later, in his pajamas and bathrobe, carrying a book.

“I brought the book,” Tony said as he came through the door.

“Good.” Lucy stood up. “Get into bed.”

Tony looked around him as he took off his robe. “Where’s Jeff?”

Lucy took the book and seated herself next to the glider, where the light of the lamp was strongest. “He had to go,” she said. “He remembered he had a date.”

“Oh,” Tony said, disappointed. He got into bed after moving the telescope so that he could reach it easily. “That’s funny. He didn’t tell me.”

“You mustn’t expect him to tell you everything,” Lucy said calmly. She opened the book. It was Huckleberry Finn. Oliver had made a list of books that were to be read to Tony during the summer and this was the third on the list. The next book to be read was a biography of Abraham Lincoln. “Is this the place?” Lucy asked.

“Where the leaf is,” said Tony. He was using a maple leaf as a bookmark.

“I see,” said Lucy.

She read the first few lines silently to orient herself and there was silence except for the busy sounds of crickets in the woods around them.

Tony took off his glasses and put them on the floor next to the telescope. He wriggled under the bedclothes and stretched luxuriously. “Isn’t this great?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if it was summertime all year long?”

“Yes, Tony,” said Lucy, and began to read. “So we went over to where the canoe was,” she read, “and while he built a fire in a grassy open place amongst the trees, I fetched meal and bacon and coffee, and a coffee-pot and frying pan, and the nigger was set back considerable, because he reckoned it was all done with witchcraft.…”