Lucy Crown (27 page)

He laughed, falsely, and Lucy felt she couldn’t stay in the room a moment longer. She sprang up from her chair. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have to go and see that the dinner isn’t burning up.”

She fled into the kitchen, making sure the door was shut tight behind her, so that she wouldn’t hear what they were saying in the living room. She worked distractedly, uselessly, not paying attention to what she was doing, wishing that the day was over, the week-end, the year … Oh, God, she thought, the accidents! Why did they have to meet Collins at the game? Why couldn’t it have been raining, so that they would never have left the house? Why did Oliver have to invite him over? Why did I let him kiss me? Why does Oliver let him call him Ollie?

She put the turkey on the platter and the sweet potatoes around it and the gravy in a boat and the cranberry sauce in a bowl. Then she sat down next to the window, staring out at the graying afternoon, her hands folded desolately in her lap, waiting until she heard the voices die down in the living room, and a few minutes later, the sound of Collins’ car going off down the street.

Then she carried the holiday turkey into the dining room, smiling almost correctly, crying, “Dinner, dinner,” knowing that nothing was going to be any good.

Tony hardly talked during the meal and Oliver talked too much, drinking almost a whole bottle of wine, and making a rambling speech about politics and taxes and the possibility of war, speaking with his mouth full of food, looking over their heads, not waiting for answers.

After the meal was over, Oliver said he had promised Collins he was going to walk over to his house for a brandy. He asked Tony and Lucy if they wanted to go with him and seemed relieved when Tony said, “No,” and Lucy said that she was tired and wanted to take a nap.

Oliver went out of the house, humming, loudly, a march that the high-school band had played between the halves that morning. For a moment, left alone at the cluttered table with Tony, Lucy thought that, finally, she could talk to him, and, by saying the exact, right word, cure them all. But Tony’s face was still and removed and she got up from the table and said, “Leave everything, I’ll clear it up later,” and went up to her bedroom without looking back.

She lay down on the bed and dozed a bit, pursued by dreams, and doors seemed to open and close in her dreams and there were steps in a shadowy, distant hallway and a final soft thud of a faraway door shutting.

When she woke, unrefreshed, she went down to the living room and it was without surprise that she saw the note on the library table. She picked it up and took the note out of the envelope and read, still unsurprised, in Tony’s handwriting, that he had decided that it would be better if he went back to school.

“I despise what you have done to my father,” he wrote, “and what you have made him turn into and I don’t want to see him again in this house with you and with the kind of friends you have driven him to.”

There was something that had been heavily scratched out at the end of the letter and for a while she didn’t bother to try to decipher it. She sat wearily in the dimming November afternoon light, the letter in her hand, oppressed by accident and failure.

After a while she turned on a lamp and looked more closely at the scratched-out sentence that ended the note. She puzzled over it, holding it directly under the lamp light, and after a minute or two she saw what Tony had put there.

“I repudiate you,” he had written, and she wondered why he had taken the trouble to cross it out.

16

A
ND THE NEXT TIME
she saw him was through the cigarette smoke at the bar in Paris, with the noise of the piano behind her and the Negro singing “Le piano des pauvres” with a broad Harlem accent, and the college boy holding her hand among the beer-glasses on the table.

How many years between the somber November twilight and the club owner saying, nastily, “Let me advise you, Madame, to telephone first. Mr. Crown is married. To a beautiful and charming lady”? Sixteen years. And a war won and lost; Oliver dead; age accepted or nearly accepted; everything repaired, or almost repaired; revisions accomplished; pain and loss misted over by habit, dimmed in the memory, incapable, one had thought, of causing further harm.

She slept very little that night, in the high-ceilinged, old-fashioned hotel room, the wide, lumpy bed crowded against the wall by a huge, dark armoire whose door she couldn’t quite close and which creaked gently and warningly from time to time in the darkness, disturbed by the wind that came in through the slit of the iron shutters at the window.

She lay in the bed, listening to the obscure complaints of the armoire door, on the edge of sleep, changing her mind a dozen times, deciding to leave the next morning, deciding to go to the address the man had written down for her at the bar, deciding to act as though she had never seen Tony, and go sightseeing the next day, as she had planned, the Louvre, Versailles, the walk, along the river, deciding to jump up immediately and call him on the telephone and say … what? “This is your mother. Do you still hate me?” or, “I happened to go into a night club a few hours ago and guess who I saw standing at the bar …”

She fell asleep, remembering his face, so much like the other face, dead and almost forgotten, remembering the child’s face from which it had been formed, narrow, soft-skinned, with the speckled gray eyes which were so much like hers.

It was early, not much past eight o’clock, when she woke in the morning, with the sound of the Vespa’s and motorbikes and trucks coming in off the street. She lay still, listening uncomfortably, not remembering for an instant, but conscious that something had changed, feeling no longer like a tourist, but like a victim, in the strange, shaded room.

Then she remembered and understood why she felt that way. She made herself get out of bed and look at the clock. She regretted that she had not slept later, because if she had, she would have been able to tell herself that it was too late, he undoubtedly would be out of the house, at work …

She bathed, in cool water, to try to wake herself up, and dressed hurriedly and mechanically, anxiously looking at the clock, like a woman with a train to catch. She looked in the mirror before leaving the room. She stared curiously at herself, wondering what he would see when they met. Even in the daylight, she realized without vanity, even with so little sleep, she didn’t look so bad. Her eyes were clear, the skin smooth, she didn’t need any make-up except a little lipstick because she was tanned, the dark blond of her hair was highlighted by the strawy streaks that always came out in it when she stayed in the sun.

She put on a hat and started out, then stopped and took the hat off and threw it on the bed. She didn’t wear a hat except on ceremonial occasions, and she didn’t want this to be a ceremonial occasion. She brushed her hair nervously once more, then, on a sudden impulse, went over to where her valise was lying open on its stand and reached into the pocket under the top lid and took out a wrinkled, crumbling envelope. Carefully, she put the envelope into her bag and went out of the room.

Downstairs, she hailed a taxi, and managed to make the driver understand the address in only two tries. As she settled on the seat in back, and the taxi started off down the cool, tree-lined street, she had a small feeling of triumph. Perhaps it’s an omen, she thought. Maybe today I can communicate with everybody.

Bouncing on the rough springs of the taxi seat, moving swiftly along the foreign streets, she didn’t know exactly what she wished to communicate to her son. It was difficult, even, to know just why she was going to see him or what she expected from the visit. She just knew that it had to be done. It was like opening a door to a long corridor in a dream and feeling that for some reason that would never be clear, before the dream ended it would be necessary to go to the end of the corridor.

The taxi stopped in front of an apartment house on a quiet street and she got out and paid the driver, trying to control the slight shaking of her hands. Before going in, she looked at the face of the house. It was of anonymous gray stone, rather shabby and weatherbeaten, one of those buildings which have very little beauty in themselves but which combine, somehow, in Paris, with the similar buildings around them, to make a soberly pleasant pattern on street after street of the city.

At home, she realized, people who lived in a house like that would move to another neighborhood as soon as a rise in salary came along.

She went in and said clearly to the fat blond woman in the concierge’s room, “Monsieur Crown, s’il vous plait.”

“Troisième, à gauche,” the concierge said, looking at her sharply, suspecting everything.

Lucy translated laboriously for herself and pushed the button in the elevator for the third floor. The hall was dark when she got out and she fumbled for more than a minute before she found the button of the doorbell, to the left of the elevator shaft. She heard the bell ring inside the apartment, and the muffled sound of a vacuum cleaner somewhere else in the building, insistent and annoying.

The door did not open, and Lucy rang again, hoping guiltily that there was no one home, that she could make her way down the dark stairway and into the street and away from the building without having to come face to face with her son. She was just about to turn away when she heard steps within and the door opened.

A young woman stood there, in a pink wrapper, a young, small woman with short dark hair, outlined against bright sunlight that poured into the hallway behind her. Lucy couldn’t see her face, just the small, slender silhouette against the light.

“Mrs. Crown?” Lucy said.

“Yes.” The woman stood there, with the door thrown carelessly wide open.

“Is Mr. Crown in?” Lucy asked.

“No.” The woman made a quick, inquisitive movement of her head, as though she was trying to get a better look at Lucy.

“Will he be back soon?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said. Her voice was cool and unfriendly. “I don’t know when he’ll be back. Who shall I say called?”

“My name is Crown,” Lucy said, feeling ridiculous. “I’m his mother.”

They stood silently for a moment, facing each other. Then the woman chuckled drily.

“Come in,” she said, taking Lucy’s arm. “It’s about time we got to know each other.”

She led Lucy down the hall and into the living room. The room was cluttered and a breakfast tray was set on a low table in front of the couch, with a half-drunk cup of coffee, a smoldering cigarette, and the Continental edition of the
Tribune,
turned back to the editorial page.

“Well, now,” the woman said, turning toward her, smiling a little. “Welcome to Paris.”

It was hard to tell whether the words and the smile that went with them were derisive or not, and Lucy stood there, waiting, cautious, uncomfortable, on foreign and uncertain ground.

“First,” the woman said, staring directly at Lucy, “I suppose I ought to introduce myself. Or do you know my name?”

“No,” said Lucy, “I’m afraid I …”

“Dora,” the woman said. “And I know yours. Won’t you sit down? And can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“Well,” Lucy said, “if Tony’s not here … I wouldn’t like to interfere with your morning.”

“I have nothing to do with my morning,” the girl said, “I’ll go get another cup.”

She left, walking lightly, the pink wrapper floating through the beams of sunlight that came in through the open windows. Lucy sat down on a straight chair, looking around her at the room. It was a room that had seen better days. The paint was old and soiled, the rugs threadbare. It gave an impression of rented furniture, things slightly out of repair, a provisional and careless existence. Only two large, brilliant paintings on the wall, abstract and nervous, gave the feeling of personal choice, ownership.

They must be poor, Lucy thought, or nearly poor. Where did all the money go?

Dora came back, carrying a cup and saucer. While she was pouring the coffee, Lucy examined her obliquely. She was very young, with deep black eyes, and a heavy mass of dark hair pulled back from her forehead with attractive austerity. She had a pointed small face and a wide, full mouth, whose sensuality was accentuated and made somehow disturbing by the paleness of her skin. With a cigarette hanging from her lips, squinting a little, bent over the low table as she poured the coffee, Dora’s face seemed marked by resignation and a permanent dissatisfaction.

Maybe it’s the style for the young married set this year, Lucy thought, accepting the cup and saucer. Maybe this year they have decided to look dissatisfied.

“Well, now, at last,” Dora said, seating herself directly across from Lucy in a low, rumpled easy chair. “I’m sorry Tony isn’t here to do the honors.”

“Has he gone out already?” Lucy asked.

“No,” Dora said, without expression. “He hasn’t come in yet.”

“Does he work at night?” Lucy asked, confused.

“No,” said Dora.

“I mean … I saw him at two o’clock, in a bar …” Lucy stopped, embarrassed.

“Did you?” Dora said, without interest. “How was the reunion?”

“I didn’t speak to him. When he left, I got the address from the manager.”

“Was he alone?” Dora tilted her head back, finishing her coffee.

“Yes.”

“Fancy that.” The tone of the girl’s voice was still flat, automatic.

“I’m sorry,” said Lucy. “I don’t want to meddle … Perhaps I’d better go. If you want, when he gets back, you can tell him I’m in Paris and I’ll leave the telephone number of my hotel and if he …”

“Don’t go, don’t go,” the girl said. “You’re not meddling. And he’s liable to come in any minute. Or any week.” She laughed drily. “Oh, it’s not as bad as you think,” she said. “Or anyway, I like to tell myself it’s not as bad as people think. He has a studio near here and sometimes when he’s working hard or when he can’t stand domesticity any more, he stays there. If you saw him at a bar at two o’clock, I guess he wasn’t working very hard last night, though.”

“A studio?” Lucy asked. “What does he do in a studio?”