Patterson shrugged again. “It hardly seemed worth the trouble,” he said, almost truthfully.
“Good God,” Oliver said. “Marriage.”
They sat in silence for a moment, gloomily, two men fixed in contemplation of complexity, waste, cross-purposes. Patterson allowed his mind to wander away from Oliver, and he remembered some of the other problems that he had been confronted with just that day, in the ordinary course of his work, in his own office. Mrs. Sayers, who was only thirty-three years old, but who had five children, and who was suffering stubbornly from anemia and who was tired all the time; so tired, she said, that when she had to get up at six-thirty every morning, to prepare breakfast and take care of the kids, it was like climbing up on the cross, she said, and she meant it. And nothing, as far as Patterson could see, to be done about it. And Mr. Lindsay, who was a machinist, and whose hands were so crippled with arthritis that he could barely hold his tools, and the effort of trying to hide it from the foreman so great that the sweat broke out on his face from the minute he entered the shop until long after he got home at night. And nothing to be done about it. And the woman who had come into his office three months’ pregnant, only her husband had been in Panama for six months. All the routine, random misery, and ailments that the human race casually pushed across a doctor’s desk every day of the week. And a step removed from that—the newspaper tragedies—the men who were going into battle in Spain, and who would be dead or broken by tomorrow evening, and the people being hunted down and destroyed all over Europe …
By any objective scale, Patterson thought, Oliver’s pain must be minute and inconsiderable. Only no man calculated his agony against an objective scale, and a thousand deaths on another continent finally were likely to weigh less in a man’s private balance than his own toothache.
No, Patterson corrected himself, it’s not fair. There was also the question of tolerance of injury to be considered. The threshold of pain varied enormously—one man might suffer an amputation with nothing more than a stoical grunt, while another might go into shock with a crushed finger. Perhaps Oliver was a man with a low threshold of pain when the injury was infidelity.
“Self-expression,” Oliver was saying thoughtfully, staring down at his hands spread out on the tablecloth.
“What?” Patterson asked, forgetting for a moment.
“Your theory,” Oliver said.
“Oh, yes,” Patterson said, smiling. “Of course, you must remember it’s just a theory and I haven’t kept any scientific checks …”
“Go on,” Oliver said.
“Well, with a man like you,” Patterson said, “who insists upon making all the decisions at all times, for everybody …”
“It’s not because I want to,” Oliver protested. I’d be delighted if other people would take the responsibility. But people just diddle around …”
Patterson grinned. “Exactly. Well, after a few years like that, it seems to me that a woman’d begin to feel that the thing she wanted most, the thing she just had to do—would be to make one big important decision by herself. And you’d closed all the other fields to her—you told her where she was to live and how she was to live and how she was to bring up her son—By God, I remember now, you even told her what the menus should be for dinner.”
“I have special tastes in food,” Oliver said defensively. “I don’t see why I can’t eat what I want in my own house.”
Patterson laughed, and a second later, Oliver laughed, too. “Hell,” he said, “I must have some reputation around this town.”
“Well, it is true, you’re considered a man who knows his own mind, Oliver.”
“If she had so many objections,” Oliver said, “why didn’t she speak up? Nobody’s under a vow of silence in our house.”
“Maybe she was afraid to. Or maybe she didn’t know she had: the objections until this summer.”
“Until a twenty-year-old boy came along,” Oliver said sullenly, “who doesn’t have to shave more than twice a week and who hasn’t got anything better to do than lounge around a lake all summer, playing with married women.”
“Maybe,” Patterson said astringently.
“At least,” Oliver said, “if it was a grand passion—if she was in love with him, if she was ready to make some sacrifices for him! But he told me himself—she laughed at him when he asked her to marry him! It’s so damn frivolous!”
“I can’t help you there,” Patterson said. “And I think, in the long run, you’re going to be glad it was frivolous.”
Oliver tapped the table impatiently. “And then, to top it all,” he said, “she had to be so inept. Letting the boy see her.”
“Oh,” Patterson said, “children see worse things than that. They see their parents being cowardly, or cruel, or crooked …”
“It’s easy for you to talk,” Oliver said. “You don’t have a son.”
“Send him away to school for a couple of years,” Patterson said, ignoring what Oliver had just said, “and he’ll forget it. Children forget everything.”
“You think so?”
“Sure,” said Patterson, being glib.
“I’ll have a lot of things to forget, too.” Oliver sighed.
“Grownups forget everything, too,” Patterson said.
“You know you’re a liar,” said Oliver.
Patterson smiled. “Yes.”
“Then what’re you talking like that for?”
“Because I’m your friend,” Patterson said soberly, “and I know you want to take her back, and I want to give you all the reasons why you should, even if they’re lousy reasons.”
“Some day,” Oliver said sarcastically, “when you’re in trouble, make sure to come to me for advice.”
“I’ll do that,” Patterson said.
“So—what do you think I ought to do?” Oliver asked. “Practically?”
“Go up there tomorrow and be noble,” Patterson said promptly. “Forgive her. Take her to your bosom. Tell her you know she’ll be a paragon amongst wives from now on. Tell her you’ll let her arrange her own menus from now on …”
“Leave out the jokes,” Oliver said.
“Don’t send her off in the summer by herself any more.”
“She didn’t want to stay up there,” Oliver remembered. “She begged me to take her back with me. If I let her, she’d hang around my neck twenty-four hours a day.”
“There you are,” Patterson said.
“It’s so damned complicated. And what can I tell Tony?”
“Tell him it was an accident,” said Patterson. “A grown-up accident, that he’s too young at the moment to understand. Tell him you’ll explain everything when he’s twenty-one years old. Tell him to be a good boy at school and stop looking through windows.”
“He’s going to hate us,” Oliver said, peering down into his cup. “He’s going to wind up hating both of us.”
There was nothing to be said to this and Patterson didn’t try. They sat in silence for a moment, then Oliver called for the check. “This is on me,” he said, when Patterson tried to take it. “Payment for professional services.”
On the way out of the hotel, Oliver sent a telegram to Lucy, telling her to pack and be ready, he was coming up to get her the next afternoon.
13
“ARRIVING AROUND THREE O’CLOCK, tomorrow,” the telegram had read. “Please have everything packed and be ready to leave immediately. Wish to make as much of the trip in daylight as possible. Oliver.”
Lucy had re-read the telegram a half dozen times. She had been tempted to telephone Oliver, but had decided against it. Let him come, she had thought. Let it be settled, once and for all.
After the night of Oliver’s visit, Lucy had stayed in the cottage, numbly forcing herself to go through the routine of holiday with Tony, waiting, in the beginning, for something to happen, some message, some event which would push her one way or another, bring the season to a climax, disastrous, or violent if need be, but punctuating her life, finishing one section, marking the beginning of another.