“I’m going to live in each of those places three months,” Tony said matter-of-factly, “after I get out of medical school. I’m going to be a ship’s doctor for ten years.” He took off his shirt and went over to the cupboard and opened the door, making the skeleton swing out into the room, with a dry, unpleasant clatter of loose bones. Tony hung his shirt neatly on a hook and closed the cupboard door.
Ship’s doctor, Oliver thought. What an ambition! He kept his eyes off Tony and stared at the map. Paris, Calcutta, Beirut. Distance, he thought.
“And where’d you get the skeleton?” Oliver asked.
“In a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue,” Tony said. “In New York.”
“Do they let you go to New York by yourself?” Oliver asked, beginning to feel that it was hopeless to try to keep up with the plans and movements of his son.
“No,” Tony said, thoughtfully touching the skeleton. “I tell them I’m going home for the week-end.”
“Oh,” Oliver said lamely. “I see.” For a moment, he had a vision of his wife and his son, unknown to him, unknown to each other, standing on opposite corners of the same avenue, waiting for the lights to change, crossing, in the crowds, close enough to touch, never touching. With a sense of revulsion, he watched Tony, naked from the waist up, thoughtfully fingering the skeleton. “How much did that cost?” he asked.
“Eighty bucks.”
“What?” Oliver couldn’t stifle the tone of surprise. “Where’d you get that much money?”
“I won it at bridge,” Tony said calmly. “We have a regular game. I win three out of four times.”
“Does Mr. Hollis know about this?”
Tony laughed coldly. “He doesn’t know about anything.” He raised his arm and touched the base of the skeleton’s skull. “The occipital bone,” he said. “I know the names of all the bones.”
A more normal father, Oliver thought, with a more normal son, would praise him for such proof of industry. But the sight of the bare, smooth adolescent torso, vulnerable, slender, balanced and neatly shaped, next to the yellowed sticks of the pawnshop skeleton was suddenly unbearable to Oliver.
“Come over here,” he said brusquely, going to the basin in the corner of the room, “and let’s get this over with. I have to be in New York by six o’clock.”
Tony gave the skeleton one last, affectionate pat, which started once more the dicelike clacking of the bones. Then,, obediently, he walked toward the basin and stood in front of Oliver.
“First, wash your face,” Oliver said.
Tony took off his glasses and turned the water on and washed his face. He did it thoroughly, meticulously. Then he dried his hands and turned toward Oliver, the fuzz on his cheeks darkened and flattened by the water.
Oliver rubbed the shaving cream carefully onto Tony’s face, feeling the sharpness and delicacy of the cheekbones under his fingertips. Tony stood patiently, unblinking, without moving. Like an old blasé horse being shod, Oliver thought.
Oliver used the razor a little uncertainly, in small, tentative strokes. He had never shaved anyone else before and it was different from shaving yourself. As he worked, he remembered, sharply, the day that his own father had shaved him for the first time. It had been the summer when he was fourteen, in the big house at Watch Hill, facing the ocean, and his father had come up for the week-end and had squinted at him, puzzledly, for several hours, much as he himself had squinted at Tony during lunch. Only, at the end of it, his father had burst into laughter and had roughly mussed Oliver’s hair and had marched him up to the old, dark mahogany bathroom, shouting through the halls for the entire family to come and watch.
Oliver’s older brother wasn’t there that week-end, but his mother and his two sisters, aged twelve and ten, a little disturbed by the unaccustomed boisterousness of their father, had appeared at the doorway of the bathroom, where Oliver was standing, grinning uneasily and stripped to the waist, while Oliver’s father methodically stropped his ivory-handled, straight-edge razor.
As Oliver cautiously made narrow swathes in the shaving cream on Tony’s cheek, he remembered, with total clarity, the exact, flat, pleasing, rhythmic noise that the razor in his father’s hand had made against the leather strap that hung next to the marble basin in the bathroom on the seashore in 1912. He remembered, too, the dry smell of the shaving soap, the feel of the badger-hair brush, the mixed smell of his father’s bay rum and his mother’s lavender that always hung in a thin, mysterious perfume in the bathroom. He remembered the feel of the ocean salt on his bare shoulders from the morning swim, and his mother in a blue organdy dress and his sisters, barelegged and grave, at the door of the bathroom.
“Come in, come in,” his father had said. “Watch the initiation of a man, ladies.”
His mother and sisters had stood there in the doorway, while his father had worked up the lather on his face, but when his father had taken the razor and had flipped it three or four times on the palm of his hand, his mother had tapped the shoulders of her daughters and had said, “This is no place for us, girls. This is for the males of the tribe.” She had been smiling, but the smile had been a funny one, one that Oliver had never seen on his mother’s face before, and she had firmly led the girls out and closed the bathroom door before Oliver’s father had made the first stroke with the razor. Oliver’s father had watched silently, gravely, for several long moments after the door had closed. Then he had chuckled, and holding Oliver’s chin with one hand, he had shaved him, swiftly, accurately, with assurance. Oliver still remembered the feel of his father’s fingers on his jaw, firm, strong, gentle—and, he realized much later, after his father was dead, full of love and regret.
With his own hand on his son’s chin, conscious that his movements lacked the assurance of his father’s at that distant, similar ceremony, Oliver was obscurely oppressed by the recurrence of rites, with their different weight of love and gayety. Remembering, for the first time in many years, vanished summers, almost-forgotten children, unvisited rooms, his robust and sure-fingered dead father, Oliver had the feeling that when Tony, in his turn, looked back from the vantage point of maturity on this half-comic, half-solemn moment, in the bare, neat dormitory room, with its flaking skeleton and its map marked with the colored pins of escape, he would have reason to complain of his father.
None of this showed on his face, Oliver was sure, as he matter-of-factly scraped the thick white cream from Tony’s jaws and chin. He finished, taking the last bit of fuzz off the boy’s upper lip, and stepped back. “There we are,” he said. “Now wash your face.”
Tony bent over the basin, cupping water in his hands and splashing himself vigorously. Oliver looked at the bent, naked back, thin, but with a wiry shape of muscle that the ill-fitting jacket had belied. The skin, Oliver noted suddenly, was exactly the same color and texture as Lucy’s, soft, very smooth, very white, with a healthy, glowing flush of blood near the surface.
When Tony straightened up and dried his face, he looked, for the first time, into the mirror above the washbasin. Staring at himself, he touched, with one hand, the new smoothness of his cheeks. Oliver, standing behind him, met Tony’s eyes in the mirror. With the glasses off, they were exactly Lucy’s eyes, large, deep gray, shadowy, intelligent. Suddenly, examining his son’s scrubbed, lean, adolescent face in the mirror, Oliver realized that Tony was going to be a spectacularly handsome man.
Almost as if he had divined what was going on in his father’s mind, Tony grinned at Oliver in the mirror. “Boy,” he said, embarrassed and pleased with himself, “we’re going to kill them.”
Then they both chuckled. And then Oliver knew that it was going to be impossible to leave Tony to the Thanksgiving dinner of the Hollises, to the headmaster’s hearty, paid-up hospitality, and his regretful misgivings, to the mournful prophecies he would make to his buxom wife about the future he foresaw for young Crown, to the company of the deserted boys whose parents were in India or who came from broken homes and had failed to get invited for the holidays to homes that were not yet broken.