But nothing had happened. Oliver had not called or written; Jeff had disappeared; the days wore on, sunny, long, ordinary. She went in to meals with Tony, she worked with him on his eye exercises, she went swimming with him, read to him, feeling that everything she did was unreal, that what she was doing she was not doing because it was useful, but because it was habit, like a ruined man going daily to his office to work over accounts that had long been closed merely because he had grown accustomed to it through the years and there was nothing else he could think of to do with his time.
She watched Tony greedily, but every day, under the cloak of custom and familiarity, she had the feeling that he was becoming more and more unknown to her. If, suddenly, he had leaped up and denounced her in the dining room, if she had awakened and found him standing over her bed with a knife in his hand, if he had disappeared forever into the forest, she would have had to say to herself, “Of course, I expected something like that.”
He was polite, obedient, ungiving, and with the passage of each day she felt the strain becoming greater. It was as though, each night, when she put the light out in his room, and said, “Good night, Tony,” somebody, somewhere, was turning a ratchet to which her life was attached and pulling her one notch tighter.
Ten days passed; the guests departed from the hotel, the nights turned chilly, the members of the band packed their instruments and returned to the city. Tony seemed neither happy nor unhappy. He held the door open for her politely when they went in to dinner, he came immediately out of the water when she called to him, “You’re getting cold, you’d better dry yourself now,” he asked no questions, volunteered nothing.
When she caught him watching her, his eyes seemed to her the eyes of a grown man, stubborn, unrelenting, accusing. By the end of the ten days she found that it was only by a painful act of memory that she could remember what he had seemed like earlier in the summer. And it was almost impossible to believe that so short a time ago she had considered him a little boy, loving, childish and easy to handle. Now, when they sat together on the lawn, in a stiff, artificial representation of a mother with her son on holiday, she felt herself rattled and clumsy, resenting him more and more each day, like two strangers, shipwrecked, floating across the ocean on a raft, begrudging each other the daily swallow of water from the canteen, suspicious of each movement. Soon his remoteness seemed to her to be open malevolence, his cold politeness an unhealthy and precocious vengeance on her. Finally, she thought, What right has he to sit there judging me like that? Unreasonably accepting him not as a child, but as a mature and implacable opponent, she thought, In the long run, what have I done to him?
And mixed with it all, there was a growing resentment of Oliver, too, for leaving her there alone with Tony for ten days, each of them using the other, she felt, to punish her.
At last, Lucy wrote Oliver and told him that she was going to leave him. She wrote it without heat, without excuses, without disclosing her plans for the future.
Actually, she had no plans for the future. It seemed to take all her energy, all her powers, merely to wake up each morning and know that for another fourteen hours she would have to support the scrutiny of her son.
In the act of writing the letter to Oliver, she had forced herself to make certain decisions about herself. But even as she made them, she had the feeling that they were provisional, that a smile from Tony, a word from Oliver, might overthrow them completely. “I must leave you,” she had written. “It’s impossible for me and Tony to live in the same house,” and she had meant it, but as time wore on she had almost lost her belief in the validity of what she had written, as a condemned man, after months of waiting in his cell, comes to believe more in the permanence of his, bars, the faces of his guards, the regularity and monotony of his diet and his hours of exercise than in the words of the sentence, which, at some distant and by now unimaginable hour, will abruptly kill him.
Then the telegram had come and broken the painful but familiar routine, the drift, the sense of being suspended in time, the feeling of being able to postpone, indefinitely, the decisions that would change her life.
She had told Tony to get ready and had helped him pack and now his bags were all neatly arranged on the porch—the telescope, the baseball bat, the fishing rod, the debris and symbols of boyhood and summer, leaning against an angle of the wall. She had packed nothing of her own. Tony had noticed it, she knew, but silent as ever, had said nothing about it. It was nearly three o’clock now and Lucy sat quietly on the porch, waiting, her eyes going again and again to the small pile of her son’s belongings. It was a clear brilliant day, with a touch of autumn in the air, and the lake had taken on a colder blue, preparing for winter.
Tony came out, dressed in the suit in which he had made the trip up to the lake and which now, after only two months, seemed too small for him. He was carrying a small valise which he put down next to the others. “Is that the last one?” Lucy asked.
“Yes,” said Tony.
“Did you look around? Is everything cleared out of your room?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“You’re sure there’s nothing left?” said Lucy.
“There’s nothing left,” Tony said.
Lucy watched him for a moment and stared out at the quiet lake and the distant, hazy mountains. “You can almost see the autumn approaching,” she said. She shivered a little. “It’s a season I never liked. It’s funny,” she said, trying to make a connection, even in this fragile way, with her son, “it’s funny not to hear the bugle any more, isn’t it?”
Tony didn’t answer. He looked at his watch. “What time is Daddy coming?” he asked.
“He’ll be here any minute,” said Lucy, once more defeated. “He said he’d be here about three o’clock.”
“I think I’ll go wait for him down at the gate.” Tony started off.
“Tony,” said Lucy.
He stopped. “What?” he asked flatly.
“Come over here,” Lucy said—almost coquettishly. “Please.”
Reluctantly Tony came back and stood in front of her. “What do you want?” he asked.
“I want to look at you, in your city clothes,” Lucy said. “You look so grown-up. Those sleeves are too short for you.” She touched his shoulder. “And it’s awfully tight across here, isn’t it? You must have grown inches this summer. You’ll have to get a new wardrobe for school as soon as you get home.”
“I’m going down to the gate,” Tony said.
Lucy made a last effort. “Tony,” she said, smiling tremulously, feeling that this was the last possible moment, alone here with everyone else departed, the hills and the lake silently plunging into autumn, “Tony, will you give me a kiss?”
He stood there impassively but not unkindly, studying his mother’s face. Then he turned, without emotion or resentment, and started away. Lucy flushed. “Tony,” she called sharply. He stopped once more and looked at her patiently. “What do you want?” he asked.
Lucy hesitated. “Nothing,” she said.
There were footsteps from around the corner of the house and Jeff came into view. He, too, was wearing city clothes, a brown tweed suit, and a carefully knotted tie. He was carrying the phonograph under his arm. That boy, Lucy thought, with an hysterical desire to laugh, makes all his entrances and exits lugging a phonograph. Jeff came up to the porch tentatively. He looked much paler than he had two weeks before, as though he had been indoors all the intervening time. He stopped without coming onto the porch. “Hello, Tony,” he said. “Lucy.”