“We haven’t finished the chess game yet,” Tony said. “I have him in a gruesome position.”
“Finish it tomorrow,” said Lucy. “You’ll still have him in a gruesome position.”
“Righteo,” Tony said, and pulled his head inside the house, letting the screen fall with a bang.
Jeff came onto the porch and stood in front of her. He started to put out his arms toward her, but she moved off and switched on the lamp that stood on the rattan table near the big glider on which Tony was going to sleep.
“Lucy,” Jeff whispered, following her. “Don’t run away.”
“It didn’t happen,” she said. Nervously, she pushed one of Tony’s shirts, on which she had been sewing buttons that afternoon, into a sewing basket that was on the table. “Nothing happened. Forget it. I beg you. Forget it.”
“Never,” he said, standing close to her. He put out his hand and touched her mouth. “Your lips …”
She heard herself moan and even as the sound came from her she was surprised at it. She had the feeling that she was losing control of the simplest mechanical gestures, the movement of her arms, the voice in her throat. “No,” she said and pushed past Jeff, scraping harshly at her mouth with the back of her hand.
Tony came out, loaded with bedclothes, and dumped them on the glider. “Listen, Jeff,” he said. “You’re not to study the board until tomorrow morning.”
“What? What’s that?” Jeff turned slowly toward the boy.
“No unfair advantages,” Tony said. “You promise?”
“I promise,” Jeff said. He smiled stiffly at Tony, then bent over and picked up Tony’s telescope, which was lying under a chair, and seemed to become absorbed in polishing the lens with the sleeve of his shirt.
Lucy watched Tony as he began to arrange the sheets and the blankets on the glider. “You’re sure you want to sleep out here tonight?” she asked, thinking, I will be motherly, that will bring me back. “You won’t be too cold?”
“It’s not cold,” Tony said cheerfully. “Millions of people sleep out in the summertime, don’t they, Jeff?”
“Millions,” Jeff said, still polishing the lens of the telescope. He was seated now and he was bent over and Lucy couldn’t see his face.
“Soldiers, hunters, mountain climbers,” said Tony. “I’m going to write Daddy and ask him to bring me a sleeping bag. Then I can sleep out in the snow, too.”
“You’ll have plenty of time for that,” Jeff said. He stood up and Lucy, watching him, saw that his face was quiet, unchanged, and that his expression was once more the usual one of friendly and skeptical indulgence that he displayed to Tony.
I have to be careful of him, Lucy thought. He is too resilient for me. It is not only the waists of young men that are flexible.
“Plenty of time, Tony,” Jeff said carelessly. “In World War Twelve.”
“That isn’t funny,” Lucy said sharply. She went over and started helping Tony make up the glider for the night.
“Pardon,” Jeff said. “World War Fifteen.”
“Don’t be sore at him, Mummy,” Tony said. “We have a deal. He talks to me just as though I was twenty years old.”
“There won’t be any World War Twelve or Fifteen or World War Anything,” Lucy said. She was frightened of the idea of war and she refused to read any of the news from Spain, where the Civil War had been going on for a year, and she had successfully prevented Oliver from buying tin soldiers or air-rifles for Tony when he was younger. Actually, she would not have been so touchy on the subject if somehow she could have been guaranteed that whatever war took place would come at a time when Tony was either too young or too old to be involved in it. If she had been forced to state her position she would have said that patriotism was only for people with large families. “Talk about something else,” she said.
“Talk about something else, Tony,” Jeff said obediently.
“Did you look at the moon tonight, Jeff?” Tony asked. “It’s nearly full. You can see just about everything.”
“The moon,” said Jeff. He lay down on his back on the floor of the porch and took one of the wooden chairs and up-ended it, holding it steady between his knees. He used the crossbar as a rest for the telescope and squinted off into the sky.
“What’re you doing there?” Lucy asked, almost suspiciously.
“Tony showed me this,” Jeff said, adjusting the telescope. “You’ve got to have a steady field, don’t you, Tony?”
“Otherwise,” Tony said, working busily on the glider, “the stars blur.”
“And one thing, we won’t have around here,” said Jeff, “is blurred stars.” He made a final quarter turn on the tube. “Consider the unblurred moon,” he said professorially. “An interesting place to visit, if you like traveling. Sail on a stone boat across the Mare Crisium … In English, Tony?”
“Sea of Crises,” Tony said automatically.
“Crises,” Jeff said. “Even on the cold, dead moon.”
He couldn’t have meant what he said before, Lucy thought resentfully, he was just trying it on, if he can play like this with Tony now.
“And to the south,” Jeff was saying, “a more pleasant place. The Mare Foecunditas.”
“The Sea of Fertility,” Tony said promptly.
“We will dip you in that two or three times, just to make sure.” Jeff grinned, lying there on his back, with the telescope pointed toward the stars.
“Jeff,” Lucy said, warningly.
“The Sea of Tranquility, the Marsh of Sleep, the Lake of Dreams,” Jeff went on, as though he hadn’t heard her, his deep youthful voice with its pleasant, educated touch of Boston making a trance-like music out of the names. “Maybe the moon is the place to move to this century, after all. When were you born, Tony?”
“March twenty-sixth,” Tony said. He was making an elaborate hospital corner with the sheets and the blankets on the lower edge of the glider mattress.
“Aries,” Jeff said. He put the telescope down and lay with his head back on the wooden flooring of the porch. His eyes were closed now, as though he were searching for visions, listening to unworldly voices, waiting for omens from the heavens. “The sign of the Ram, the horned beast in the heavens. Do you know how the Ram got there, Tony?”
“Do you believe in that stuff?” Tony stopped his work on the bed for a moment and looked at Jeff.
“I believe in everything,” Jeff said, still with his eyes closed, his voice liturgical and solemn. “I believe in the Zodiac and luck and transmigration of souls and sacrifice and secret diplomacy, secretly arrived at.”
“Human sacrifice,” Tony said incredulously. “Did people ever really do that?”
“Of course,” Jeff said.
“Until when?” Tony asked skeptically.
“Until yesterday at three-fifteen P.M. It’s the only kind of sacrifice that ever does any good,” Jeff said. “Wait until you’ve tried it two or three times, Tony, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“All right, Jeff, that’s enough of that,” Lucy said, thinking, He’s deliberately provoking me, he’s revenging himself on me. “Tony, pay attention here.”
“Phrixus and Helle,” Jeff said, almost as if she hadn’t spoken, “sons of the King of Thessaly, were badly treated by their stepmother …”
“Is this educational?” Lucy said, determined to show nothing.
“Enormously,” Jeff said.
“What was her name?” Tony asked.
“Who?”
“The stepmother.”
“That’s in the next lesson,” Jeff said. “So Mercury took pity on the boys and sent a ram with golden fleece to help them escape. The ram carried them on his back, high above the earth and everything was going fine until they came to the strait that separates Europe from Asia. Then Helle fell and was drowned and they call the water the Hellespont to this day. And when Phrixus reached Colchis, which was a lively town when the weather was right, he sacrificed the ram in gratitude and Jupiter set the poor dead flying beast among the stars in recognition of his service to the king’s son …”