“Please,” Lucy said, “for the last time … go find yourself some other girl. There’re dozens of them. Young, unattached, who have no one to answer to when the summer is over.”
He stared at her, then nodded, as though agreeing. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “But you must promise not to laugh.”
“All right,” Lucy said, puzzled. “I won’t laugh.”
Jeff took a deep breath. “There are no other girls,” he said. “There never have been.”
Lucy lowered her head. She noticed that one of the middle buttons of her waist was undone. She closed it carefully. Then she began to laugh, helplessly.
“You promised,” Jeff said, hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her eyes, trying to control her mouth. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at myself.”
“Why?” he asked suspiciously.
“Because we’re both so clumsy,” she said. “Because we’re both so hopeless. Because neither of us knows how to do this.” Now she was looking at him squarely and soberly. “Because we’re going to do it,” she said.
They stood that way in silence for a second. Jeff made an uncertain movement with his hands. She took a step toward him and kissed him, hard.
“Lucy,” he whispered. He touched the back of her neck lightly with his hand.
“Now, little boy,” Lucy said, sounding motherly, almost jocular, pushing him away, “go to your nice, dark, empty sister’s house and sit on the porch and look at the moon and think of all the younger, prettier women you might have made love to tonight—and wait for me.”
Jeff made no move. “You … you’ll come there?” He asked warily, disturbed by her strange switch in attitude. “You’re not joking now? It’s not a trick?”
“It’s not a trick,” Lucy said lightly. “I’ll come along, never fear.”
Jeff tried to kiss her again, but she held him off, smiling, shaking her head. Then he wheeled and went quickly across the lawn, his shoes making no sound in the dewy grass. Lucy watched him disappear. Then she shook her head again and moved absently over to the glider. She was sitting there, her hands quiet in her lap, looking out at the misted lake, when Tony came out a few minutes later, in his pajamas and bathrobe, carrying a book.
“I brought the book,” Tony said as he came through the door.
“Good.” Lucy stood up. “Get into bed.”
Tony looked around him as he took off his robe. “Where’s Jeff?”
Lucy took the book and seated herself next to the glider, where the light of the lamp was strongest. “He had to go,” she said. “He remembered he had a date.”
“Oh,” Tony said, disappointed. He got into bed after moving the telescope so that he could reach it easily. “That’s funny. He didn’t tell me.”
“You mustn’t expect him to tell you everything,” Lucy said calmly. She opened the book. It was Huckleberry Finn. Oliver had made a list of books that were to be read to Tony during the summer and this was the third on the list. The next book to be read was a biography of Abraham Lincoln. “Is this the place?” Lucy asked.
“Where the leaf is,” said Tony. He was using a maple leaf as a bookmark.
“I see,” said Lucy.
She read the first few lines silently to orient herself and there was silence except for the busy sounds of crickets in the woods around them.
Tony took off his glasses and put them on the floor next to the telescope. He wriggled under the bedclothes and stretched luxuriously. “Isn’t this great?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if it was summertime all year long?”
“Yes, Tony,” said Lucy, and began to read. “So we went over to where the canoe was,” she read, “and while he built a fire in a grassy open place amongst the trees, I fetched meal and bacon and coffee, and a coffee-pot and frying pan, and the nigger was set back considerable, because he reckoned it was all done with witchcraft.…”
7
SHE LAY ON THE NARROW bed with his head on her breast, holding him lightly, watching him sleep. He had said, when she saw his eyelids drooping, “No, how could I sleep on a night like this?” Then he had sighed and moved his head gently against her breast, and had drifted off. He had a triumphant expression on his face, like a small boy who has accomplished something difficult and praiseworthy in the presence of his elders, and she smiled, seeing it, and touched his forehead with her fingertips.
He had also murmured, “Forever,” once, his lips against her throat, and she remembered it now and thought, How young you have to be to say forever.
He had been hesitant and uncertain in the very beginning, but after the first violent awkwardness, he had found, almost as if it had been locked always in him, needing only her touch to free it, a delicacy and gentleness that had moved Lucy profoundly and in a manner in which she had never been moved before.
Now, lying with the sleeping boy pressed against her, her limbs feeling light and powerful, Lucy thought calmly of the moment of passion as though it were already far in the past, something that had happened once, long ago, and would never happen again. They would make love from time to time, perhaps, but it would never again be like this.
The sign of Virgo, she remembered. In the region of the Euphrates, she remembered, almost hearing again Jeff’s youthful, playful voice, it was identified with Venus … Virgoans are shy and fear to be brilliant. Virgoans fear impurity and disorder and are liable to peptic ulcers.
She chuckled softly and the boy moved in her arms. A frown came over his face and he threw his head back on the pillow fearfully, as though he were trying to escape a blow. Lucy stroked his shoulder, which was dry and warm, and seemed still to be giving off the heat of the sun that had fallen on it during the day. The obscure look of terror slowly flowed out of his face and his lips relaxed and he slept steadily again.
The time, she thought. I ought to get up and see what time it is. It must be nearly dawn. But she lay there quietly, feeling somehow that even to be thinking about the hour was a form of betrayal of the boy beside her.
She had no desire to sleep. Sleep, she felt, would subtract from the completeness of the night. She wanted to lie there serenely, conscious of every sound—Jeff’s steady breathing, the peeping of young frogs at the lake’s edge, the call of an owl in the pine forest, the occasional rustle of the wind against the curtains of the bare room, the faraway resonance of an automobile horn on the highway leading to the mountains. She wanted to lie there conscious, above all, of herself. The thought struck her that she felt infinitely more valuable now at three o’clock in the morning than she had felt even so recently as ten the night before or at any other time in her life. Valuable. She smiled at the word.
Examining herself with the critical pleasure of a woman before a mirror, she realized that tonight she felt finally grown-up. She had the feeling that before this a great deal of her life had been devoted to those activities that a child might engage in if the child were anxious to pretend that she was an adult. And there had always been, too, the complementary anxiety that the masquerade would be discovered at any moment. She remembered her mother, dying at the age of sixty, and knowing she was dying, lying in her bed, yellowed and wasted, after a life of pain, trouble, poverty, disappointment, saying, “I can’t believe it. The hardest thing to believe is that I’m an old woman. Somehow, unless I catch sight of myself in a mirror, I still have the same feeling about myself that I had when I was sixteen years old. And even now, when the doctor comes in and pulls a long face, and I know he thinks I’m not going to last through the month, I want to tell him, ‘No, there’s been a misunderstanding. Dying is much too sophisticated for someone who feels sixteen years old.’”