Lucy Crown (2 page)

“That man who was standing here,” the woman said. “The one who just went out with you …”

“Yes?” The owner put on his cautions, non-understanding, waiting face, thinking, Good God, at her age.

“Do you know his name?”

“Well … let me see …” The owner pretended to search for it, tantalizing her, displeased with this naked and unseemly pursuit, out of respect for the memory of the women of whom the lady had reminded him earlier in the evening. “Yes, I think I do,” he said. “Crown. Tony Crown.”

The woman closed her eyes and put out her hand toward the bar, as though to steady herself. As the owner watched her, puzzled, she opened her eyes and pushed away, with a little impatient movement, from the bar. “Do you happen to know where he lives?” the woman asked. Her voice was flat now, and the owner had a curious, momentary impression that she would be relieved if he said no.

He hesitated. Then he shrugged, and told her the address. He wasn’t there to make people behave themselves. He was in the business of running a bar and that meant pleasing his customers. And if that included humoring aging ladies who came around asking for the addresses of young men, that was their affair.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll write it out for you.” He scribbled it quickly on a pad and ripped off the sheet and gave it to her. She held it stiffly and he noticed that the paper rattled a little, because her hands were trembling.

Then he couldn’t help being nasty. “Let me advise you, Madame, to telephone first,” he said. “Or even better, write. Mr. Crown is married. To a beautiful and charming lady.”

The woman looked at him as though she didn’t quite believe that he had said what he had said. Then she laughed. Her laugh was real, unforced, musical. “Why, you silly man,” the woman said, laughing. “He’s my son.”

Then she folded the paper with the address on it, after looking at it carefully, and put it into her bag. “Thank you,” she said. “And good night. I’ve already paid the bill.”

He bowed, and watched her, feeling foolish, as she went out.

Americans, he thought. The most mysterious people in the world.

2

W
HEN WE LOOK BACK
into the past, we recognize a moment in time which was decisive, at which the pattern of our lives changed, a moment at which we moved irrevocably off in a new direction. The change may be a result of planning or accident; we may leave happiness or ruins behind us and advance to a different happiness or more thorough ruin; but there is no going back. The moment may be just that, a second in which a wheel is turned, a look exchanged, a sentence spoken—or it may be a long afternoon, a week, a season, during which the issue is in doubt, in which the wheel is turned a hundred times, the small, accumulating accidents permitted to happen. For Lucy Crown it was a summer.

It began like other summers.

There was the sound of hammering from the cottages around the lake as screens were put into place, and the rafts were floated out into the water in time for the first bathers. At the boys’ camp at one end of the lake, the baseball diamond was weeded and rolled, the canoes arranged on their racks, and a new gilt ball put on top of the flagpole in front of the messhall. The owners of the two hotels had had their buildings repainted in May, because it was 1937 and it looked, finally, even in Vermont, as though the Depression was over.

At the end of June, when the Crowns drove up to the same cottage they had rented the year before, all three of them, Oliver, Lucy, and Tony, who was thirteen years old that summer, sensed with pleasure the air of drowsy, pre-holiday anticipation that hung over the place. The pleasure was intensified by the fact that since they had been there last, Tony had nearly died and had not died.

Oliver only had two weeks to spend at the lake before he had to go back to Hartford, and he devoted most of that time to Tony, fishing with him, swimming a little, going on leisurely walks through the woods, trying, as delicately as possible, to make Tony feel that he was leading an active and normal thirteen-year-old life, while keeping his exertions down to the level that Sam Patterson, their family doctor, had prescribed as being safe.

Now the two weeks were over and it was Sunday afternoon and one of Oliver’s bags was standing, packed, on the cottage porch. All around the lake there was a little extra traffic and bustle of departure, as husbands and fathers, lethargic from the Sunday dinner and peeling from the week-end sun, got into their cars and started back to the cities where they worked, leaving their families behind, according to the American custom which decrees that those who need them the least get the longest vacations.

Oliver and Patterson were lounging in canvas deck chairs on the lawn, under a maple tree, facing out toward the lake. They had glasses of Scotch and soda in their hands and occasionally one o£ them would shake his drink to enjoy the sound of ice against the glass.

They were both tall men, approximately the same age, and obviously of the same class and education, but they were marked by wide differences of temperament. Oliver still had the body and movements of an athlete, precise, quick and energetic. Patterson seemed to have let himself go somewhat. A slouch seemed natural to him and even when you saw him sitting down you had the feeling that when he stood he would stoop over a little. He had shrewd eyes, which he kept half-veiled almost all the time by a lazy droop of the eyelids, and there were habitual wrinkles from laughter cut into the skin at their corners. His eyebrows were thick and unruly and overhanging and his hair was coarse, unevenly cut, with a good deal of rough gray in it. Oliver, who knew Patterson very well, once told Lucy that he was sure that Patterson had looked in a mirror one day and decided quite coldly that he had a choice between appearing rather conventionally good-looking, like a second leading man in the movies, or letting himself go a little and being interestingly grizzled. “Sam’s a clever man,” Oliver had said approvingly, “and he opted for the grizzle.”

Oliver was already dressed for the city. He wore a seersucker suit and a blue shirt and his hair was a little long because he hadn’t bothered to go to a barber on his holiday and his skin was evenly tanned from the hours on the lake. Looking at him, Patterson thought that Oliver was at his best at this moment, when all the advantages of his vacation were so clearly marked on him, but at the same time wearing clothes that in this setting gave him an air of urban formality. He ought to wear a moustache, Patterson thought idly; he would look most impressive. He looks like a man who ought to be doing something complicated, important and rather dangerous; he looks like the portraits of young Confederate cavalry commanders you used to see in histories of the Civil War. If I looked like that, Patterson thought, and all I did was run a printing business that my father left me, I think I would be disappointed.

Across the lake, where a slanting outcropping of granite dipped into the water, they could see Lucy and Tony, minute sunny figures floating quietly in a small boat. Tony was fishing. Lucy hadn’t wanted to take him, because it was Oliver’s last afternoon, but Oliver had insisted, not only for Tony’s sake but because he felt that Lucy had an unhealthy tendency to sentimentalize arrivals and farewells and anniversaries and holidays.

Patterson was dressed in corduroy trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, because he still had to go up to the hotel, which was about two hundred yards away, on the same estate, and pack his bag and get dressed. The cottage was too small for guests.

When Patterson had volunteered to come up for the week-end to check up on Tony, which would save Lucy and the boy a long trip down to Hartford later in the summer, Oliver had been touched by this evidence of thoughtfulness on his friend’s part. Then he saw Patterson with a Mrs. Wales who was staying at the hotel, and he had been less touched. Mrs. Wales was a handsome brunette, with a small, full figure and avid eyes, who came from New York, a place that Patterson found an excuse to visit, without his wife, at least twice a month. Mrs. Wales, it turned out, had arrived on Thursday, the day before Patterson had stepped off the train, and was due to leave for New York again, discreetly, the following Tuesday. She and Patterson made a point of being most formal and correct with each other, even to the extent of not calling each other by their first names. But after twenty years of friendship with the doctor, who had always been ambitious, as Oliver put it, with women, Oliver was not to be fooled. He was too reticent to say anything, but he tempered his gratitude for Patterson’s long trip to Vermont with a touch of fond, though cynical amusement.

From the boys’ camp a half mile away across the lake came the thin music of a bugle. The two men listened in silence, sipping their drinks, while the sound died echoing away on the water.

“Bugles,” Oliver said. “They have an old-fashioned sound, don’t they?” He stared drowsily at the distant boat in which his wife and son floated, just on the edge of the shadow of the granite shelf. “Reveille, Assembly, Retreat, Lights out.” He shook his head. “Preparing the younger generation for the world of tomorrow.”

“Maybe they’d be better off using a siren,” Patterson said. “Take Cover. Enemy Overhead. All Clear …”

“Aren’t you cheerful?” Oliver said good-naturedly.

Patterson grinned. “Actually, I am. It’s just that a doctor always sounds so much more intelligent when he’s gloomy. I can’t resist the temptation.”

They sat in silence for a moment, remembering the bugle, vaguely thinking of old, enjoyable wars. There was a telescope which belonged to Tony, lying on the lawn beside Oliver, and he idly picked it up. He put the telescope to his eye and focused it across the water. The distant skiff became clearer and larger in the round blur of the lens and Oliver could see Tony slowly reeling in his line and Lucy begin to row toward home. Tony had a red sweater on, even though it was hot in the sun. Lucy was wearing a bathing suit and her back was deep brown against the blue-gray of the distant granite. She rowed steadily and strongly, the oars making an occasional small white splash in the still water. My ship is coming in, Oliver thought, smiling inwardly at the large saltwater image for such a modest arrival.

“Sam,” Oliver said, still with the telescope to his eye. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Yes?”

“I want you to tell Lucy and Tony exactly what you told me.”

Patterson seemed almost asleep. He was slumped in his chair, his chin down on his chest, his eyes half-closed, his long legs stretched out. He grunted. “Tony, too?”

“Most important of all, Tony,” Oliver said.

“You’re sure?”

Oliver put the telescope down and nodded decisively. “Absolutely,” he said. “He trusts us completely … so far.”

“How old is he now?” Patterson asked.

“Thirteen.”

“Amazing.”

“What’s amazing?”

Patterson grinned. “In this day and age. A boy thirteen years old who still trusts his parents.”

“Now, Sam,” Oliver said, “you’re going out of your way to sound intelligent again.”

“Perhaps,” Patterson said agreeably, taking a sip of his drink and staring at the boat, still far out on the sunny surface of the water. “People’re always asking doctors to tell them the truth,” he said. “Then when they get it …” He shrugged. “The level of regret is very high in the truth department, Oliver.”

“Tell me, Sam,” said Oliver, “do you always tell the truth when you’re asked for it?”

“Rarely. I believe in another principle.”

“What’s that?”

“The principle,” Patterson said, “of the soft, healing lie.”

“I don’t think that there is such a thing as a healing lie,” said Oliver.

“You come from the North,” said Patterson, smiling. “Remember, I’m from Virginia.”

“You’re no more from Virginia than I am.”

“Well,” Patterson said, “my father came from Virginia. It leaves its marks.”

“No matter where your father came from,” Oliver said, “you must tell the truth
sometime,
Sam.”

“Yes,” said Patterson.

“When?”

“When I think people can stand it,” Patterson said, keeping his tone light, almost joking.

“Tony can stand it,” said Oliver. “He has a lot of guts.”

Patterson nodded. “Yes, he has. Why not—at the age of thirteen.” He took another drink and held up his glass, turning it in his hand, inspecting it. “What about Lucy?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about Lucy,” Oliver said stiffly.

“Does she agree with you?” Patterson persisted.

“No.” Oliver made an impatient gesture. “If it was up to her, Tony would reach the age of thirty believing that babies came out of cabbage patches, that nobody ever died, and that the Constitution guaranteed that everyone had to love Anthony Crown above everything else on earth, on pain of imprisonment for life.”

Patterson grinned.

“You smile,” Oliver said. “Before you have a son, you think that what you’re going to do with him is raise him and educate him. That isn’t what you do at all. What you do is struggle inch by inch for his immortal soul.”

“You should have had a few others,” Patterson said. “The debate gets less intense that way.”

“Well, we don’t have a few others,” said Oliver, flatly. “Are you going to tell Tony or not?”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“I want it to be official,” said Oliver. “I want him to get used to the verdict of authority, unmodified by love.”

“Unmodified by love,” Patterson repeated softly, thinking, What a curious man he is. I don’t know another man who would use a phrase like that. The verdict of authority, he thought.
My boy, do not expect to live to a ripe old age.
“All right, Oliver,” he said. “On your responsibility.”

“On my responsibility,” Oliver said.

“Mr. Crown …?”

Oliver turned around in his chair. A young man was approaching across the lawn from the direction of the house. “Yes?” Oliver said.

The young man came around in front of the two men and stopped. “I’m Jeffrey Bunner,” he said. “Mr. Miles, the manager of the hotel, sent me down here.”

“Yes?” Oliver looked at him puzzledly.