Lucy Crown

8

THE CALL OF AN owl awakened Tony. He had kicked the blankets off, because he slept restlessly, and he was cold, too. He reached down and pulled the blankets up onto the glider and lay there, with the blankets in a disorderly pile on top of him, shivering, waiting to get warm again, listening to the owl. Now there were two owls. One nearby, right behind the house, and one somewhere along the lake, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. They were hooting to each other, over and over again in the darkness, monotonous and threatening, like Indians signaling to each other before making the final dash at the house.

He didn’t like owls. He didn’t like things that made noises at night. And if they had so much to say to each other, why didn’t they just fly across to each other and meet halfway? But they didn’t. They just sat there, hidden in the trees, making that sneaky noise to each other. He didn’t like the way they flew, either. They had a fat, suspicious way of flying, he thought, and he bet they smelled bad, too, when you got up close to them.

The moon was down by now and it was very dark. He was a little sorry now that he hadn’t slept inside, in his own room. It wasn’t that he was afraid of the dark. If it hadn’t been for the owls, he wouldn’t give it another thought. It was just that lying there, with everything black around, the way they sounded made you feel as though something bad was preparing to happen to you.

He thought of getting up and going into the house to see what time it was. It had to be after four o’clock, because he knew the moon was due to set at three-fifty-seven this morning. He bet there wasn’t a single boy in that whole camp across the lake that knew that the moon set at three-fifty-seven this morning.

If he went in to look at the time he could go in and look at his mother. Except she might wake up, and then what would he say? That the owls scared him? That he was afraid of the dark? It would be all right with her, but she’d be liable to write it to his father and his father’d probably write him a long letter, joking about it. He didn’t mind joking, but there were certain things he’d just rather people didn’t joke about.

Of course, his mother might not wake up. There was the time he had gone into her room in the middle of the night and she had been sleeping so soundly that he couldn’t hear her breathe. She just lay there, and the blankets hadn’t even gone up and down. A terrible thought had hit him. She’s not asleep, he had thought. She’s dead. He couldn’t bear it and he had gone over to the bed and leaned over and raised one of her eyelids with his fingers. She never moved. She just lay there and it wasn’t her eye at all. It was something blank, that didn’t see anything, that didn’t have any light in it. It was the worst thing he’d ever seen. It was deader than anything he’d ever imagined. It had frightened him and he’d let go of her eyelid and it had closed again and she had moved and begun to breathe more heavily and she was his mother again. He had gone out of the room quietly and got into his own bed, knowing he would never do anything like that again. And he hadn’t told her about it, either. There were a lot of things he didn’t tell anybody about. The idea of being dead, for example. Whenever he came into the room and they happened to be talking about it, like the time old man Watkins died next door, they shut up and began talking about the weather or about school or about any darn thing. He pretended he didn’t catch on, but he caught on all right. When he was four years old his grandmother died in his aunt’s house in Haverford. He had been taken up there to say good-bye to her in the big, old house with the greenhouse out back. He remembered two smells from the house. The smell before his grandmother was dying, which was the smell of all the apple and pumpkin and pineapple pies that had been baked in the house and the smell of his grandmother dying, medicine and people smoking downstairs and people being afraid. At the last minute, his grandmother had decided to die in a hurry and they didn’t have time to take him to a hotel and the house was crowded and they put him in a little room off the hall and he heard people going past all night and whispering and crying, and he remembered somebody saying, “She is at peace.”

He’d thought about it a lot, although he didn’t say anything about it, because he knew people wouldn’t like the idea of his talking about something like that. He’d come to the conclusion that his grandmother had decided to die in the middle of the night because she didn’t want to do it in daylight, when people could see her and make her ashamed. For a long time he thought that’s what you did—you decided to die and you died. If you didn’t decide to do it, you stayed alive. It was yourself, he’d thought, and you did what you wanted with yourself. Then a funny thing changed his mind. He broke his finger trying to catch a baseball. He must have been about eight. The finger was crooked after that. The top joint bent over in a queer way. After a while, the finger didn’t feel bad, but it still was bent over at the end. He could straighten it out by pushing it against a table, but when he took it away from the table, it went back being crooked again. He’d looked at it and he’d said to himself, It’s my finger, if I say, “Straighten up,” it would have to straighten up. But it stayed twisted, just the same. That’s when he’d begun to realize that if you told your body, “Don’t die,” it wouldn’t make any difference, you’d die just the same.

There were a lot of things you didn’t tell anybody. For instance, school. His father had asked him how he would like to go away to school next autumn and he’d said he’d like to, because he knew that was what his father wanted him to say and he didn’t want to disappoint him. His father didn’t say anything when he was disappointed, but you could tell just the same. It was almost like a smell or somebody whispering in the next room, and you couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but you could get the idea all right. And it was worse than if he said anything. And he’d disappointed his father enough by being so sick. The way Tony knew that was by watching his father when his father was looking at other boys his age.

He knew his father wanted him to be something big when he grew up. So when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “Astronomer,” because nobody else ever thought of that. Everybody else said a doctor or a lawyer or a baseball player and his father always laughed when he said it and Tony knew his father thought it showed how original he was and still didn’t take it too seriously, so there was no business of practicing anything or worrying about getting good marks in school so you could go to Harvard.

About the school, though. He would have to do something about that. He didn’t mind school, but he didn’t want to go away from his mother. If he said that to his father, his father would look that way again, and start to talk about how when people grew up they didn’t hang around their mothers all the time. Maybe, Tony thought, just about the end of the summer, when it’s too late to keep me in bed much up here, I can have an attack. A little attack. I can say I can’t breathe very well and I see dots in front of my eyes. And if I stay out in the sun one whole day, I can be pretty hot and it would look an awful lot like a fever.

Being sick wasn’t altogether bad, except in the beginning, when everything hurt and they put bandages on his eyes and they kept coming in every ten minutes. After that, his mother had stayed with him almost all day, every day, reading to him, playing spelling games, singing to him, having lunch with him in his room. And when the other kids came in to visit him, he had it all over them, because he told them he’d nearly died and none of them had ever nearly died.

Albert Barker had tried to make up for not having nearly died, like him, by telling him about babies. According to Albert Barker a lady and a man got into bed with no clothes on and the man climbed on top of the lady and said, “Move your legs,” and the lady made a funny sound (Albert Barker had tried to imitate it—it was a kind of low grunt, like somebody picking up a heavy box) and sometime after that the lady got very big and the baby was born. He was pretty sure Albert Barker was making most of this up, but he couldn’t question him more closely because his mother had come into the room with milk and cookies and he had a feeling this was one of the things, like dying, not to talk about in front of grownups.

Albert Barker had never come back to visit him. The kids had visited him once or twice, in the beginning, but then they’d stopped, because there wasn’t anything much to do, just sitting around the room like that. But his mother had said they were waiting for him to get better and be able to come out and play with them again and then they’d be just as good friends as ever.

He didn’t really mind their not coming to see him, because his mother was around all the time, but he’d have liked to see Albert Barker once more and get that straight.

He wondered if Susan Nickerson knew about it. She seemed to know a lot about a lot of things. Only she didn’t pay much attention to him. Every once in a while she would go swimming with him or she’d come around and talk to him, but she always seemed to be looking for something else or waiting for a telephone to ring, and if somebody else showed up, she’d go right off.

He wished the summertime would last longer. He’d figure out some way of making Susan Nickerson pay attention to him if the summertime lasted long enough. Summertime was better than winter. People were together more in the summertime. In the winter everybody was in a hurry. In the winter everybody separated and became absent-minded.

Jeff was going to college and he wouldn’t see him for months. Maybe forever. Forever. It was a bad word, but sometimes you had to face words like that. And even if he did see him, it wouldn’t be the same thing. People were one way if you saw them all the time, every day, and they were another thing if you only saw them every couple of months. They really were thinking about something else after a couple of months.

That was one of the reasons he didn’t want to go away to school—when he got back his mother would be thinking about something else. Grownups didn’t seem to mind that. When they left each other, they said good-bye and shook hands and they didn’t care if they didn’t see each other for months—for years—forever. Grownups didn’t really know how to be friends. Even when his grandmother had died and they’d buried her, his father hadn’t changed much. His father had read the paper at breakfast the next morning and the day after the funeral he’d gone off to work as usual and after a week or so he was playing bridge at night, just as though nothing had happened.

Tony shivered a little and pulled the blankets up around him. He was sorry he had started thinking about things like that. Still, if his mother died, he’d guarantee he wouldn’t be playing bridge a week later.

Maybe the thing to be was a doctor, a scientist. Then you could work on a serum to keep people alive forever. You could start with monkeys. You would keep it very quiet and then one day you would take the monkey to the auditorium of a college, and everybody would be sitting there, wondering, waiting to hear what you had to say, and you’d lead the monkey onto the stage and you’d say, “Gentlemen, forty years ago I injected this monkey with my secret serum, Number Qy zero seven. You will notice that he has no gray hairs and he can swing from the highest trees.”

Then you’d be very strict about who got any of the serum. You’d start with your mother and father and Jeff and Dr. Patterson, but there’d be a lot of people to whom you’d say, “No, I’m sorry, there isn’t enough to go around.” No matter what they offered you. You wouldn’t give your reasons, but you’d have darn good reasons, every time.

He chuckled to himself, under the blankets, as he thought of what people’s faces would look like when he said, “No, there isn’t enough to go around.”

He turned over on his side and he was just about to close his eyes, thinking of the immortal old monkey, when he saw someone coming across the lawn toward the house. He stopped breathing for a moment, and didn’t move, watching. Then he saw that it was his mother, in a loose, open coat, coming across the grass. There was a light mist, close to the ground, and his mother seemed to be floating toward him over a gray lake. He didn’t say anything until she reached the porch. She stopped then and turned around and looked out over the mist for a few seconds. It was very dark, just one little light coming through the curtains from inside the house, on the other side of the porch, but he could tell that his mother was smiling.

“Mummy,” he said, whispering, because it was so late and so dark.

Even though he spoke in a low voice, she jumped a little. She came over to him and leaned over him and kissed his forehead. “What’re you doing up?” she asked.

“I was listening to the owls,” he said. “Where were you?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just took a little walk.”

“You know what I’m going to be when I grow up?” he said.

“What, darling?”

“A doctor. I’m going to experiment with monkeys.”

She laughed and touched his hair with her fingers. “When did you decide that?”

“Tonight.” But he didn’t tell her his reasons. The reasons could wait.

“Well,” she said, “this has been a very important night, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.

She leaned over and kissed him. She smelled warm and her coat smelled of pine needles, as though she had brushed against saplings in the woods. “Good night, now, Doctor,” she said. “Sleep tight.”

She went into the house and he closed his eyes. He heard her moving around softly inside the house, and then the light was put out and it was quiet. It was lucky, he thought, that I didn’t go in to see if she was there when I woke up. I wouldn’t have found her and I’d’ve been scared.

The owls stopped hooting, because the dawn was coming up, and he slept.