Then she wrenched her head away and turned and went into the house. The screen door slammed lightly behind her. Oliver looked after her for a moment, then drained his drink and picked up his bags and went to the side of the house, where the car was parked under a tree. He put the bags into the car, hesitated a moment, then said, under his breath, “The hell with it.” He got into the car and started the motor. He was backing out when Lucy came out of the house and over to the car. He cut the engine and waited.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice, standing against the car, her hand on the door.
Oliver took her hand and patted it. “Let’s forget it,” he said gently.
Lucy leaned over and kissed his cheek. She touched his tie with a flutter of her hand. “Buy yourself some new ties,” she said. “All your ties look as though you got them for Christmas, 1929.” She looked at him, smiling uncertainly, pleading. “And don’t be angry with me.”
“Of course not,” Oliver said, relieved that the afternoon and the departure were healed. Or almost healed. Or at least healed on the surface.
“Call me up during the week,” Lucy said. “And use the forbidden word.”
“I will.” Oliver leaned over and kissed her. Then he started the motor once more. Lucy stepped back. They waved at each other as Oliver drove the car up toward the hotel.
Lucy stood in the shade of the tree, watching the car disappear around a turn, hidden by the grove of trees. She sighed and went back into the living room. She sat down heavily on a dark wooden chair. She looked around her, thinking, No matter how many flowers you put in here, this room is impossible. She sat there, remembering the sound of the car, moving away up the narrow, sandy road. She sat there, in the ugly, fragrant room, thinking, Defeat, defeat. I always lose. I am always the one who says, I’m sorry.
4
SITTING BESIDE OLIVER IN the sedate Buick as they drove through the white Vermont towns, Patterson settled back comfortably in the front seat, pleased with everything, pleased with the neat, efficient way Oliver drove, pleased with the weather, with the week-end, with the memory of Mrs. Wales, with his friendship with the Crowns, with the recovery of Tony, pleased with the image of Lucy, barelegged, with her white sweater loose over her bathing suit, stopping in the sunlight, leaning on Oliver’s shoulder, to shake out a pebble that had been caught between her toes and the sole of her wooden clog.
He looked across at Oliver, sitting easily at the wheel, his face severe and intelligent, modified subtly by that touch of useless daring, that obsolete and almost military recklessness that Patterson had remarked when they were drinking their whiskies on the lawn. God, thought Patterson, if he were interested in other women, it would be a holy parade! If I looked like that … He grinned inwardly. He half-closed his eyes, and thought again of Lucy, caught in the sunlight, on the path up from the lake, her hair falling loose over her face as she bent over her bare, long leg.
Well, he thought, if I were married to Lucy Crown I wouldn’t look at anyone else, either.
Sometimes, when he had drunk too much or was feeling sad, he told himself that if he had permitted it, he would have fallen in love with Lucy Crown, who at that time was Lucy Hammond, the first evening he saw her, a month before she married Oliver. And there had been one night, at a dance at the country club, when he nearly had told her so. Or perhaps he had told her so. It had been confused and quick and the band was playing loudly, and Lucy had been in his arms one moment and out of them the next and there had been no doubt about it, that night he had drunk too much.
The first time Patterson had met Lucy was in the early 1920s, when Oliver brought her back to Hartford to introduce her to his family. Patterson was older than Oliver and had already been married more than a year and had just begun to practice in Hartford. The Crowns had lived in Hartford for four generations and old man Crown had a printing business that had come down in the family and had kept the Crowns comfortably rich for fifty years. There were two daughters in the family, both older than Oliver and already married, and there had been a brother who had been killed in a plane accident during the war. Oliver had trained to be a pilot, too, but had arrived in France very late and had never flown in combat.
After the war and after France, Oliver had settled in New York and started a small, experimental airplane business with two other veterans. Old man Crown had put up Oliver’s share of the money, and the three young men had set up a factory near Jersey City and some years they almost broke even.
Patterson had known Oliver ever since Oliver had been a freshman trying to make the baseball team when Patterson was a senior in high school. Even then, when Oliver couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, Patterson had envied the tall, mannerly boy the dignity and quiet self-assurance with which he conducted himself and the ease with which he came off with the highest marks in his class, made all the teams and attracted the prettiest girls in the school. After that, Patterson envied him the war, envied him France, New York, the airplane business, the large, drunken gay young men who were his partners, and when he met Lucy, he envied him Lucy. If anyone had asked either Patterson or Crown about their relationship, they would both have said, unhesitatingly, that they were each other’s best friends. Crown, as far as Patterson could tell, envied no one anything.
Lucy at that time was about twenty years old, and from the moment Oliver introduced her, Patterson began to feel a vague and sorrowful sense of loss. She was a tall girl with soft blond hair and wide gray, speckled eyes. There was something curiously Oriental about her face. The nose was flat and very straight and the bridge blended smoothly into her broad, low forehead. There was the hint of a slant about her eyes, and her upper lip turned up strangely in a flat plane and seemed to be cut off squarely and abruptly at the corners. In trying to describe her long after he knew her, Patterson said that she looked as though she came from a family of blondes among whom had slipped, secretly, and perhaps only for one night, a Balinese dancing-girl grandmother. Lucy had a full, hesitant mouth and a breathy, low, slightly disconnected way of talking, as though she never was sure that people were willing to listen to what she had to say. Her clothes were never quite stylish, but since the style that year was so hideous, that was all to the good. She seemed to be aiming at immobility, especially with her hands, keeping them folded in her lap when she was seated, and straight at her sides, like a polite and well-schooled child, when she stood. Her father and mother were dead, and she had no family except for a shadowy aunt in Chicago, of whom Patterson never found out more than that she was the same size as Lucy and sent her disastrous clothes when she had finished with them. When he was considerably older and given more closely to reflection, Patterson realized that the slightly bizarre dowdiness that her aunt’s clothes lent to Lucy gave her an added attraction, by making her different from the other girls around her, none of whom were as beautiful as she, and by introducing a warm, protective note of pity for her poverty and her youthful awkwardness.
Lucy was working then as an assistant to a research biologist at Columbia University, who was, according to Oliver, deeply involved with single-celled marine plants. It was an unlikely thing for a girl who looked like that to be doing, and what was more unlikely, she had made it plain to Oliver that she intended to continue, marriage or no marriage, and take her Ph.D. and try to get a job as an instructor, with research projects of her own. Oliver had been tolerantly amused at the idea of having a wife who was so stubbornly scientific and who messed around all day long with what he insisted upon calling algae, but as long as she looked the way she did, and as long as it meant that she stayed in New York with him, for the moment he made no protest.