Lucy Crown (24 page)

“I’d like to see some of the drawings,” he said. “If you happen to have any around.”

“They’re nothing.” Tony spooned away at his ice cream. “If anybody with any real talent came into this school, they’d never even look at mine.”

One thing this boy really can do, Oliver thought ruefully, is choke off conversation. He glanced around the room, to avoid looking at his son’s burgeoning beard, which, unaccountably, was beginning to get on his nerves. There were several boys eating with their parents at other tables, and directly across from the table at which Oliver and Tony were sitting, there was a handsome blond woman who didn’t look more than thirty-five, and who had gold bracelets on both sleeves that sounded all over the room when she moved her hands. She was sitting across from a tall, heavy-boned boy, who was obviously her son, with the same straight nose, the same direct, happy look of carefully tended health. The son had bright blond hair, cut very close, and his well-shaped head rose on a powerful, thick neck from a fullback’s broad shoulders. Oliver noticed that he was very polite with his mother, smiling often and listening eagerly, quick at passing the butter and pouring water, holding her hand unselfconsciously on top of the tablecloth as their voices mingled in quiet, friendly murmurs. American youth, Oliver thought, advertisement.

He became acutely conscious of the impression that he and Tony must give in contrast. Tony, with his long, unfashionable hair, his thin shoulders, his glasses, his fragile neck, and the puppy hair on his chin and jaws. And he himself stiff and obviously ill-at-ease, trying, as must be plain to all the room, to strike up a conversation with his taciturn and unfriendly son. As he stared across at the mother and son at the other side of the room, the woman saw him, and smiled warmly, in parental convention, at him. She had shining, even white teeth, and when she smiled she looked much less than thirty-five. Oliver smiled back and nodded. He nodded again when the boy, following his mother’s silent greeting, saw Oliver, and gravely stood up and made a little, reserved, respectful bow.

“Who’s that?” Oliver asked curiously.

Tony glanced at the other table. “Saunders,” he said, “and his mother. He’s captain of the ice-hockey team, but he’s yellow.”

“Why do you say that?” Oliver felt that he had to protest, although he wasn’t quite sure whether he was protesting on the part of the boy or on the part of the mother.

“I’ve seen him,” Tony said. “He’s yellow. Everybody knows it. He’s the richest boy in school, though.”

“Oh, is he?” Oliver glanced once more at the couple at the table, noticing more carefully the golden arms. “What does his father do?”

“Chases chorus girls,” Tony said.

“Tony!”

“Everybody knows it.” Tony methodically cleaned off the plate of ice cream. “His father isn’t so rich. It isn’t that. Saunders makes the money himself.”

“Oh, does he?” Oliver regarded the large handsome boy with new respect. “How?”

“He lends money at interest,” Tony said. “And he has a copy of the last chapter of
Ulysses
and he rents it out for a dollar a night. He’s the president of the sixth form.”

Oliver was silent for a moment. Confusedly, he remembered reading
Alice in Wonderland
and
Just So Stories
to Tony when he was six years old. A chapter a night. After Tony had his bath and his supper and was in his slippers and bathrobe, ready for bed, smelling of soap, sitting on the edge of the armchair, his feet on Oliver’s knees, so that he could see the illustrations in the lamplight.

“What do you mean, the last chapter?” Oliver asked, certain that there was some childish misunderstanding or desire to shock here.

“You know,” Tony said patiently, “Mrs. Bloom in bed, and the tenor and the soldier in Gibraltar. Yes, yes, yes. All that stuff.”

“Have you read it?”

“Of course,” Tony said. “It’s worth a buck.”

“This is a hell of a school,” Oliver said, forgetting, for the first time during the meal, the constraint that had made conversation so difficult for him. “I think maybe I’d better let Mr. Hollis know about this.”

“What’s the difference?” Tony shrugged. “Everybody in the whole school’s read it by now.”

Oliver stared, baffled, at his son, sitting two feet away from him, shaggy, with the pimples and fuzz of puberty on his face, and a cold, unafraid, measuring light in his eye, removed, mysterious, unpunishable.

“Well,” Oliver said, more loudly than was necessary, “one thing we’re going to do before we leave here is shave that damned beard off your face.”

When they left the dining room, Mrs. Saunders smiled again, radiantly, shaking her golden bracelets. Saunders, immense, smooth-cheeked, bull-necked, smiling with the gravity of a young senator, stood up and made his mannerly, serious bow.

They walked to a drugstore and Oliver bought a heavy gold-plated safety razor, the most expensive one in the shop, and some shaving soap. Tony watched him impassively, asking no questions, standing there with the clumsy piece of drawing board under his arm, glancing from time to time at the covers of the magazines that were displayed near the soda fountain. Then they went to Tony’s room, walking side by side, as other fathers and sons were doing, across the dying grass of the campus, cold and wet through the thin soles of Oliver’s city shoes. Some of the fathers lifted their hats in salute and Oliver did the same, but he noticed that the greetings between Tony and the other boys, with or without their parents, were always curt and unenthusiastic. Oh, God, Oliver thought, as he followed Tony’s narrow back up the stairs of his house, what have I got here?

Tony had a room of his own, a somber cubicle with greenish walls, one window, a narrow bed, a small desk, and a battered wooden cupboard. It was severely neat. There was an open wooden box on the desk, with a stack of papers, evenly clipped together, in it, and the books on the desk were lined up in an orderly row by two granite bookends. The bed didn’t have a wrinkle on it and no clothing was hanging in sight anywhere in the room. Automatically Oliver thought, I ought to send Lucy here to take lessons in housekeeping.

On the wall above the bed was a large map of the world, with little colored pins stuck into it, here and there. And hanging from a string from the ceiling, in front of the cupboard, was a yellowed human skeleton, wired together, with several important bones missing. On the desk was Tony’s telescope.

This was the first time that Oliver had been in Tony’s room, and he blinked, taken aback, at the skeleton. But he didn’t speak about it for the moment, telling himself, with nervous reassurance, that it probably showed commendable zeal in a boy who was preparing for the study of medicine.

“I thought everybody here shared a room with another boy,” he said, unwrapping the razor and slipping in a blade.

“That’s the idea.” Tony was standing in the middle of the room, staring reflectively at the map on the wall. “I had a room-mate, but my cough drove him out.”

“Your cough?” Oliver asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know you had a cough.”

“I don’t.” Tony grinned. “But he was a nuisance and I wanted to be alone. So I used to wake up every night at two o’clock and cough for an hour. He lasted just over a month.”

Oh, Lord, Oliver thought despairingly, Hollis is earning his money keeping
him
in school. “Take off your shirt, so you won’t get wet,” he said, opening the tube of shaving cream.

Without taking his eyes from the map, Tony began slowly to unbutton his shirt. Oliver looked more closely at the map. There was a pin stuck in the city of Paris, and a pin stuck in Singapore and pins in Jerusalem, Assisi, Constantinople, Calcutta, Avignon, Beirut.

“What’re those pins for?” he asked curiously.

“I’m going to live in each of those places three months,” Tony said matter-of-factly, “after I get out of medical school. I’m going to be a ship’s doctor for ten years.” He took off his shirt and went over to the cupboard and opened the door, making the skeleton swing out into the room, with a dry, unpleasant clatter of loose bones. Tony hung his shirt neatly on a hook and closed the cupboard door.

Ship’s doctor, Oliver thought. What an ambition! He kept his eyes off Tony and stared at the map. Paris, Calcutta, Beirut. Distance, he thought.

“And where’d you get the skeleton?” Oliver asked.

“In a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue,” Tony said. “In New York.”

“Do they let you go to New York by yourself?” Oliver asked, beginning to feel that it was hopeless to try to keep up with the plans and movements of his son.

“No,” Tony said, thoughtfully touching the skeleton. “I tell them I’m going home for the week-end.”

“Oh,” Oliver said lamely. “I see.” For a moment, he had a vision of his wife and his son, unknown to him, unknown to each other, standing on opposite corners of the same avenue, waiting for the lights to change, crossing, in the crowds, close enough to touch, never touching. With a sense of revulsion, he watched Tony, naked from the waist up, thoughtfully fingering the skeleton. “How much did that cost?” he asked.

“Eighty bucks.”

“What?” Oliver couldn’t stifle the tone of surprise. “Where’d you get that much money?”

“I won it at bridge,” Tony said calmly. “We have a regular game. I win three out of four times.”

“Does Mr. Hollis know about this?”

Tony laughed coldly. “He doesn’t know about anything.” He raised his arm and touched the base of the skeleton’s skull. “The occipital bone,” he said. “I know the names of all the bones.”

A more normal father, Oliver thought, with a more normal son, would praise him for such proof of industry. But the sight of the bare, smooth adolescent torso, vulnerable, slender, balanced and neatly shaped, next to the yellowed sticks of the pawnshop skeleton was suddenly unbearable to Oliver.

“Come over here,” he said brusquely, going to the basin in the corner of the room, “and let’s get this over with. I have to be in New York by six o’clock.”

Tony gave the skeleton one last, affectionate pat, which started once more the dicelike clacking of the bones. Then,, obediently, he walked toward the basin and stood in front of Oliver.

“First, wash your face,” Oliver said.

Tony took off his glasses and turned the water on and washed his face. He did it thoroughly, meticulously. Then he dried his hands and turned toward Oliver, the fuzz on his cheeks darkened and flattened by the water.

Oliver rubbed the shaving cream carefully onto Tony’s face, feeling the sharpness and delicacy of the cheekbones under his fingertips. Tony stood patiently, unblinking, without moving. Like an old blasé horse being shod, Oliver thought.

Oliver used the razor a little uncertainly, in small, tentative strokes. He had never shaved anyone else before and it was different from shaving yourself. As he worked, he remembered, sharply, the day that his own father had shaved him for the first time. It had been the summer when he was fourteen, in the big house at Watch Hill, facing the ocean, and his father had come up for the week-end and had squinted at him, puzzledly, for several hours, much as he himself had squinted at Tony during lunch. Only, at the end of it, his father had burst into laughter and had roughly mussed Oliver’s hair and had marched him up to the old, dark mahogany bathroom, shouting through the halls for the entire family to come and watch.

Oliver’s older brother wasn’t there that week-end, but his mother and his two sisters, aged twelve and ten, a little disturbed by the unaccustomed boisterousness of their father, had appeared at the doorway of the bathroom, where Oliver was standing, grinning uneasily and stripped to the waist, while Oliver’s father methodically stropped his ivory-handled, straight-edge razor.

As Oliver cautiously made narrow swathes in the shaving cream on Tony’s cheek, he remembered, with total clarity, the exact, flat, pleasing, rhythmic noise that the razor in his father’s hand had made against the leather strap that hung next to the marble basin in the bathroom on the seashore in 1912. He remembered, too, the dry smell of the shaving soap, the feel of the badger-hair brush, the mixed smell of his father’s bay rum and his mother’s lavender that always hung in a thin, mysterious perfume in the bathroom. He remembered the feel of the ocean salt on his bare shoulders from the morning swim, and his mother in a blue organdy dress and his sisters, barelegged and grave, at the door of the bathroom.

“Come in, come in,” his father had said. “Watch the initiation of a man, ladies.”

His mother and sisters had stood there in the doorway, while his father had worked up the lather on his face, but when his father had taken the razor and had flipped it three or four times on the palm of his hand, his mother had tapped the shoulders of her daughters and had said, “This is no place for us, girls. This is for the males of the tribe.” She had been smiling, but the smile had been a funny one, one that Oliver had never seen on his mother’s face before, and she had firmly led the girls out and closed the bathroom door before Oliver’s father had made the first stroke with the razor. Oliver’s father had watched silently, gravely, for several long moments after the door had closed. Then he had chuckled, and holding Oliver’s chin with one hand, he had shaved him, swiftly, accurately, with assurance. Oliver still remembered the feel of his father’s fingers on his jaw, firm, strong, gentle—and, he realized much later, after his father was dead, full of love and regret.

With his own hand on his son’s chin, conscious that his movements lacked the assurance of his father’s at that distant, similar ceremony, Oliver was obscurely oppressed by the recurrence of rites, with their different weight of love and gayety. Remembering, for the first time in many years, vanished summers, almost-forgotten children, unvisited rooms, his robust and sure-fingered dead father, Oliver had the feeling that when Tony, in his turn, looked back from the vantage point of maturity on this half-comic, half-solemn moment, in the bare, neat dormitory room, with its flaking skeleton and its map marked with the colored pins of escape, he would have reason to complain of his father.

None of this showed on his face, Oliver was sure, as he matter-of-factly scraped the thick white cream from Tony’s jaws and chin. He finished, taking the last bit of fuzz off the boy’s upper lip, and stepped back. “There we are,” he said. “Now wash your face.”