“I will be so frivolous,” he said gravely, “that little children will turn from me in disgust.”
Across the lake the bugle from the boys’ camp blew, and as if this were a signal for him, he made a stiff, wide salute, and turned, with military precision, on his heel, saying, “I leave you now. I go to devote my life to the pursuit of the three-leaf clover.”
He walked off slowly, head down, staring at the ground and started a methodical, quartering course over the lawn, stopping from time to time to bend over and pick one of the small plants. Lucy sat there, against the tree, her eyes half-closed, conscious of the white-shirted figure moving across the sunlit grass with the lake shining behind him and the mountains pale blue in the mid-day heat. He watched me all summer, she thought drowsily, now what about that?
6
“NOW LOOK, LUCY, YOU must remember where you put it,” Oliver was saying over the phone, his voice loaded with the weary patience which Lucy knew so well and which always froze her into a state of near-amnesia, because she knew what exasperated impatience it disguised. “Think hard.”
“I am thinking hard,” Lucy said, and she knew she sounded sullen and childish, but she couldn’t help it. “I’m sure I left all the bills in my desk.”
She was standing in the living room in the cottage as she spoke, watching Tony and Jeff playing chess under the light of a lamp at the big table in the middle of the room. Both of them were concentrating, heads close together over the board, Tony because he was determined to win and Jeff because he was being polite and did not want to seem to be listening to the conversation on the phone being conducted six feet away from him.
“Lucy, darling,” Oliver’s voice now compounded both the weariness and the patience, “I’ve looked twice in your desk. It’s not there. You’ve got bills from 1932 there and recipes for fish soup and an invitation to the wedding of two people who were divorced three years ago—but the bill from the garage is not there. I repeat,” he said slowly, in that maddening voice, “the bill for the garage is not there.”
She felt like crying. Whenever Oliver got after her for the inefficiency with which she ran the household accounts, she had a flustered, tragic sense that the modern world was too complicated for her, that unknown people came into her room when she was absent and maliciously rifled her papers, that Oliver was sure she was an idiot and regretted marrying her. If Tony and Jeff hadn’t been there she would have cried, which would have had the advantage of making Oliver relent and say, “The hell with it. It isn’t that important. I’ll straighten it out somehow.”
But even though neither Tony nor Jeff was watching her she couldn’t cry, of course. All she could say was, “I’m sure I paid it. I’m absolutely sure.”
“Jenkins says no,” Oliver said. Jenkins was the owner of the garage and Lucy despised him because he had a trick of turning from the warmest affability to whining protest when people made him wait for his money past the fifth of the month.
“Whose word are you going to take?” Lucy asked. “Jenkins’ or mine?”
“Well, it’s not in the checkbook,” Oliver said, and she could have screamed at the thin, distant persistence of the voice on the phone, “and I can’t find the receipted bill and he was most obnoxious about it today when I stopped in for gas. It’s very embarrassing, Lucy, to have a man come up to you and say you’ve owed him seventy dollars for three months, when you’ve thought you’ve paid it.”
“We have paid it,” Lucy said stubbornly, not remembering anything.
“Lucy, I repeat,” Oliver said, “we must have the bill.”
“What do you want me to do?” she cried, her voice rising, despite herself. “Come down and look for it myself? If that’s what you want, I’ll take the train tomorrow morning.”
Jeff looked up quickly at this, then returned to the game.
“Guard your queen,” he said to Tony.
“I have a deadly plan,” Tony said. “Watch.”
“No, no,” Oliver said wearily. “I’ll talk to him myself. Forget it.”
When he said, Forget it, Lucy knew that it was a sentence on her, a small, recurrent, punitive, mounting sentence.
“How are things up there?” Oliver asked, but coolly, disciplining her. “How’s Tony?”
“He’s playing chess with Jeff,” said Lucy. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“Yes, please.”
Lucy put the phone down. “Your father wants to talk to you, Tony,” she said. She started out of the room, as Tony said, “Hi, Dad.”
She was conscious that Jeff was watching her as she went out onto the porch and she had a feeling that she looked tense and humiliated.
“We saw a deer today,” Tony was saying. “He came down to the lake to drink.”
Lucy moved off across the lawn toward the shore of the lake because she didn’t want to have to talk to Oliver again. The moon was full and it was a warm night and a slight milky mist was rising from the water. From the opposite shore came the sound of the bugle. Every night after taps at the camp there, the bugler gave a short concert. Tonight he was playing French cavalry calls, very well, and the strange, quick music made the whole scene, with the borders of the lake softened and almost obscured by the rising mist, seem unfamiliar and melancholy.
Lucy stood there, holding her bare arms because of the little chill along the edge of the water, allowing her irritation to be soothed by the moonlight and the bugle calls into self-pity.
She heard the steps behind her, but she didn’t turn around and when Jeff put his arms around her she had the feeling not of a woman being pursued by a young man, but of a child taken under mature protection. And when she turned around and he kissed her, although it soon changed into something else, she had the feeling that she had been bruised and that her hurt was being assuaged. She felt his hands, smooth and hard, on the bare flesh of her back, gentle, searching, demanding. She pulled her head away and, still embraced, put her face against his shoulder.
“Oh, Lord …” Jeff whispered. He put his hand under her chin and tried to pull her head up, but she resisted and pushed deeper into the loose flannel of his shirt.
“No,” she said. “No. No more …”
“Later,” he whispered. “I have the house all to myself. My sister’s in town for the week.”
“Stop it.”
“I’ve been so good,” Jeff said. “I can’t any more. Lucy …”
“Mother …” It was Tony’s voice, high and childish, carrying across the lawn from the house. “Mother …”
Lucy broke away and hurried across the lawn.
“Yes, Tony,” she called, as she reached the porch.
“Daddy wants to know if you want to talk to him again.”
Lucy stopped and leaned against the pillar of the porch, trying to breathe properly. “Not unless he has something he particularly wants to say to me,” she said, through the open window.
“Mother says only if you have something you particularly want to say to her,” Tony said into the phone.
She waited. There was silence for a moment and then Tony said, “Okay. I will. So long,” and she heard the click of the phone as he hung up. He poked his head out through the window, lifting the screen.
“Mother,” he called.
“I’m here,” she said, from the shadows of the porch.
“Daddy said to tell you he can’t come up this week-end,” he said. “There’s a man coming in from Detroit he has to see.”
“All right, Tony,” she said, watching Jeff coming slowly through the moonlight across the lawn toward the house. “Now, if you’re going to sleep out here, you’d better start getting your bed ready.”