“What are you trying to tell me?” Oliver asked.
“I’m trying to tell you that it’s probably going to happen again.”
“You don’t mean it. You’re just saying it. You’re revenging yourself on me.”
“I mean it,” Lucy said.
“We’ll see,” Oliver said desperately. “We’ll see.”
“We won’t see,” said Lucy. “Why are you so shocked? You’ve been in locker rooms, bars, smoking rooms. Isn’t that what all the conversation amounts to? And if you could listen in on ladies’ luncheons and teas … The only difference is that after fifteen years my husband has made me tell the truth about myself and to myself.”
“No marriage can last like that, Lucy,” said Oliver.
“Maybe not,” Lucy said. “That would be too bad.”
“You’ll wind up as a lonely, forgotten old woman.”
“Maybe,” said Lucy. “But at the moment I think it will be worth it.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Oliver. “You’re so changed. You’re not the same person you were even two weeks ago.”
“You’re right. I am changed,” said Lucy. “Not for the better. Honestly, I believe that. Much for the worse. But it’s me now. It’s not a reflection of you. It’s not one unimportant, timid, pale, predictable fifth of your life. It’s me, uncovered. My own owner. My own self.”
“All right,” Oliver said sharply. “Go in and pack and let’s go home. I’ll get hold of Tony and tell him to get ready.”
Lucy sighed. Then, surprisingly, she laughed. “Oliver, darling,” she said, “you’re so in the habit of not listening to anything I say that I could tell you your clothes were on fire and you wouldn’t catch on until they’d burned right off …”
“Now, what do you mean by that?”
Lucy spoke very seriously. “I wrote you I wasn’t going home with Tony. Didn’t you read my letter?”
Oliver made an impatient gesture. “I read it. I read it,” he said. “It’s absurd. You obviously were in a state of nerves when you wrote it and …”
“Oliver,” Lucy said warningly.
“Anyway,” Oliver said, “it’s only for a few days. He’ll be going to school by the end of the month and then you’ll get a chance to calm down. You won’t see him again until Thanksgiving and …”
“I’m not going to see him for a few days,” Lucy said. “And I’m not going to see him at Thanksgiving. And I’m not going to see him at Christmas. And I’m not …”
“Lucy, stop that damned chant,” Oliver said harshly. “And don’t be a fool …”
Lucy closed her eyes wearily and waved her hand gently, dismissingly. “Why don’t you go home, the both of you,” she said, “and leave me alone?”
“I thought we settled that,” Oliver said.
“We haven’t settled anything. You said you wanted me back, and I said I wanted to come back. On certain conditions. One of the conditions is that I don’t have anything more to do with Tony.”
“For how long?” Oliver asked hoarsely.
“Forever.”
“That’s melodrama,” Oliver said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Now listen carefully,” Lucy said, standing directly in front of Oliver, controlling her voice with effort. “I mean every word I’ve said and every word I’m going to say. He hates me. He’s my enemy …”
“A thirteen-year-old boy …”
“He’s the witness against me,” Lucy said, “and he’ll never forget it, and neither will I. Every time he looks at me, he’s looking through that window that rainy afternoon. He looks at me and he’s judging me, prosecuting me, condemning me …”
“Don’t be hysterical, Lucy.” Oliver caught her hands, soothingly. “He’ll forget.”
“He won’t forget. Ask him. Ask him yourself. I can’t live in the same house with my judge like that! I can’t be made to feel guilty twenty times a day!” Her voice was shaken now and she was close to sobbing.
“You must try,” Oliver said.
“I have tried,” Lucy whispered. “I did everything I could to heal us. Even when I wrote you that I couldn’t come back with him, I still hoped … I didn’t really believe it, even while I was writing it. Then, this afternoon, he did this …” She pulled her hands away and pointed to the broken phonograph. “With a baseball bat. But it wasn’t a machine he was destroying. It was me. He was murdering me!” She was shouting crazily now. “Murder!”
Oliver seized her and shook her, sharply. “Stop that! Control yourself!”
Sobbing, not trying to free herself, she said, “He’ll poison everything. What’ll we turn out to be after five years like that? What sort of man will he be at the end of it?”
Oliver dropped his hands. They stood next to each other for a moment, without moving. Then Oliver shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said.
Lucy took in her breath in a long sigh. She bent her head and absently put her hands across her breast to her shoulders, stroking the spots where Oliver’s hand had gripped her. When she spoke her voice was flat. “Then leave me alone. Take him away with you and leave me alone. For good.”
“I can’t do that, either,” Oliver said.
In the same flat and toneless voice, still touching her shoulders gently, Lucy said, “You’ll have to do one or the other, Oliver.”
Oliver turned and went over to the edge of the porch, his back to Lucy. He leaned against a pillar, staring out across the quiet lake. And I was sure I had it all figured out, he thought. He felt defeated and incapable of further plans or decisions. What I should have done, he thought, with bitter hindsight, was pack everybody up the night I was here and get us all home together. Now, everybody’s had time to dig in.
He heard a movement behind him and he turned quickly. Lucy was opening the door of the cottage, on her way in.
“Where’re you going?” he asked suspiciously.
“Tony’s coming.” She pointed toward the hotel, and Oliver saw Tony walking swiftly toward the cottage. “I think it’d be a good idea if you talked to him.”
She went inside, the screen door tapping lightly behind her. Oliver watched her shadowy figure disappear through the rusted mesh.
He shook his head and made himself smile before he turned to face Tony. He walked out onto the lawn a little way to greet him. Tony approached warily, his face grave and watchful, and stopped before he reached his father.
“Hello, Daddy,” he said, waiting.
Oliver went over to him and put his hand around Tony’s shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Hello, Tony,” he said. Still with his arm across the boy’s shoulders, Oliver walked back to the porch.
“I’m all ready to go,” Tony said, pointing to the bags on the porch. “Should I start carrying things to the car?”
Oliver didn’t answer. He dropped his arm from Tony’s shoulders and walked slowly over to a rattan armchair. He sat down heavily, like an old man, staring at his son.
“I thought we were supposed to get out of here by three o’clock,” Tony said.
“Come over here, Tony.”
Doubtfully, as though fearing punishment, Tony walked across the porch and stopped in front of the chair. “Are you sore at me, Daddy?” he asked in a low voice.
“No. Of course not. Why should I be?”
“For calling you that night,” Tony said, looking at the floor. “For telling you what … what I saw …”
Oliver sighed. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I had to tell you, didn’t I?” Tony was pleading now.
“Yes,” Oliver said, after a pause. He stared at his son, wondering how much of this day the boy was going to remember. Children forget everything, Patterson had said. He had also said, Grownups forget everything. But none of it was true. Tony was going to remember clearly, accurately, painfully, and his life was going to be built on the memory. It would be simpler and less painful to slide past this moment, to make an excuse for taking the boy home alone, for packing him off to school alone. It would be easier to put him off temporarily if he asked about Lucy, to be vague and tricky when he wrote from school about coming home for the holidays, to let him discover slowly, by himself, over a period of time, that he had been put outside the boundaries of the family. It would be simpler, less painful, and finally, and with justice, as a grown man, Tony would despise him for it.