Tony said nothing. Lucy was taken aback. By an act of will, she had dismissed Jeff from her calculations long ago. Now, looking at him, she had a double sensation, a memory of past pleasure in him and present annoyance. She hid her annoyance by being determinedly casual. “Hello, Jeff,” she said lightly. “I didn’t know you were still around.”
“I came up again,” Jeff said uncomfortably, “to help my sister pack. I heard you were still here and I thought …” He looked at the bags in a row on the porch. “Are you leaving today?”
“What do you want?” Tony asked, ignoring the question.
“I just came to say good-bye,” Jeff said. The neat city clothes and his obvious lack of ease made him seem smaller to Lucy, seemed to push him back into awkwardness and adolescence. If he had been wearing those clothes all summer, she thought, remembering the white T shirts, the bare feet, I would never have touched him. He put the phonograph down on the edge of the porch. He smiled experimentally at Tony. “I thought you might like to have this, Tony. As a kind of a present. It’s a pretty good little phonograph. I know you like to listen to music and I thought …” He stopped, floundering under Tony’s unblinking stare.
Lucy broke in, moved by Jeff’s embarrassment. “That’s awfully kind of you,” she said in an artificial, hostess-like voice, “but really, it’s too much. What will you do those cold winter nights up in New Hampshire when the wind howls and you’re snowed in?” She looked with purposely exaggerated admiration at the phonograph. “It is a beautiful little machine, isn’t it, Tony?”
Tony didn’t move. He stood with his legs apart, dominating them both. “Are you giving it to me?” he asked Jeff.
“Yes,” said Jeff.
“Why?”
“Why?” Jeff asked, unhappy at the question. “Oh, I don’t know. Because we had some good times together this summer. Because I’d like you to remember me.”
“Are you going to say thank you, Tony?” said Lucy.
“It’s all mine?” Tony said, ignoring her, speaking directly to Jeff. “I can do whatever I want with it?”
“Sure,” said Jeff. “You can take it with you to school and put it in your room. When you start to have parties you can dance to it and …” Jeff stopped and watched tensely as Tony approached the machine, looking at it, touching it impersonally. Then Tony went over to where the baseball bat was leaning against the porch wall. He came back to the phonograph, holding the bat in one hand. With his free hand he brushed the machine off the porch, onto the lawn. Then, with great deliberation, he began to swing the bat at the phonograph.
“Tony!” Lucy called. She moved over to stop him but Jeff caught her arm. “Leave him alone,” Jeff said harshly. They watched silently while Tony coldly and methodically destroyed the phonograph.
After a minute or two Tony stopped, breathing hard. He turned and faced his mother and Jeff with a look of hard, mature triumph on his face. Deliberately he dropped the bat. “There,” he said.
“That was a brutal, wasteful thing to do,” Lucy said. “I’m ashamed of you.” She turned to Jeff. “I apologize for him.”
“Don’t you apologize for me,” Tony said. “Never. Not for anything.”
“It’s okay—Tony,” Jeff said gently. “If it made you feel better, it’s okay with me.”
Tony looked from the broken machine, first to his mother and then to Jeff. “No,” he said, “it didn’t make me feel better. I guess you want to talk to each other before my father comes. I told Bert I’d say good-bye to him before I left. I’ll be back in five minutes,” he said threateningly and strode away toward the dock.
Lucy and Jeff watched until he had gone out of sight. Then Jeff went over and touched the wreckage of the phonograph ruefully with his toe. “I bet my aunt would be surprised if she ever found out what happened to her present,” he said. He stepped onto the porch and came across to Lucy. “These last weeks,” he said, “have been gruesome, haven’t they?”
Gruesome, Lucy noted. Is that a word in vogue this year in the Eastern colleges? She hesitated. I’m not going to get involved, she thought. I’m going to finish him. “Have they?” she said lightly. She chuckled.
“What are you laughing at?” Jeff asked suspiciously.
“I keep remembering what I was thinking as Tony was whacking away at the poor little phonograph,” said Lucy.
“What’s that?”
“I kept remembering how carefully you worked with him,” Lucy said, “teaching him how to swing a bat. ‘Step in, Tony. Keep your eye on the ball.’” She mimicked him. “‘Don’t put your foot in the bucket.’ He certainly learned, didn’t he?”
“It’s not so funny,” Jeff said.
“Oh, it’s not so serious,” Lucy said airily. “Tell your aunt it was stolen and she’ll give you another one for Christmas.”
“It’s not that,” Jeff said. “He hates me.”
Lucy shrugged. “A lot of people will hate you before you’re through. What of it?”
“What about you?” Jeff said.
“Hate you?” She managed to chuckle again. “Of course not.”
“Am I going to see you again?” Jeff asked.
“Of course not,” Lucy said.
“I’m sorry,” said Jeff. He plunged his hands in his pockets. He seemed smaller than ever. “I guess I should have stayed away.”
“No,” Lucy said. “I’m glad you came. It was nice and generous. It was even a little brave.” Her tone was motherly, bantering. “Don’t pull such a long face. This was a nice, educational experience for you. The summer course for third-year students—a short term, compulsory for a bachelor’s degree—choice of instructors.”
“How can you take it so lightly?” Jeff’s face looked stricken.
“Instructors …” Lucy sounded puzzled. “What’s the feminine of instructor? Instructress? It sounds wrong somehow, doesn’t it?”
“I made a lot of trouble, didn’t I?”
Lucy made a little grimace, indicating that she thought Jeff was overestimating his importance. “People have to expect to pay a little for their fun,” she said.
“Fun?” Jeff said, shocked.
“Don’t look so scandalized,” she said. “It was fun, wasn’t it? I’d feel awful if I thought you hadn’t enjoyed it at all. If you did it just out of a sense of duty.”
“It was glorious,” Jeff said solemnly. “It was heartbreaking … it was like an earthquake.”
“Oh, my,” Lucy waved her hands in a fluttery, girlish gesture, “it’s too late to be getting solemn all over again.”
The pain was clearly evident on Jeff’s face. “You’re so different today,” he said. “Why?”
“It’s later in the season.” Lucy went over to the row of bags and stood there, frowning down at them, pretending to check them against some list in her mind.
“You’re going back?” Jeff asked. “Back to him?”
Lucy pretended to be puzzled. “Back to whom?”
“Your husband,” said Jeff.
“I imagine so,” Lucy said matter-of-factly, turning toward him. There was no sense in telling him about the letter she had written Oliver. “Don’t people usually go back to husbands? That’s one of the main reasons a girl gets married—to have someone to go back to.”
“Lucy,” he appealed to her, “what’s happened to you?”
Lucy walked toward the edge of the porch and stared out across the lake. “I guess I’ve finally become a big, grown-up lady,” she said.
“You’re making fun of me,” Jeff said bitterly. “I don’t blame you. I behaved like such a hick. Blurting out everything the minute he asked me. Going off with that damn phonograph under my arm like a kid who’s just been kicked out of school because he’s been caught smoking in the locker room.”