“Pack your bag, Tony,” Oliver said crisply. “I’m taking you home for the week-end.”
Tony remained motionless for a second, searching his father’s face in the mirror. Then, without smiling, he nodded, and put on his shirt, and unhurriedly and efficiently packed his bag.
On the drive toward New York, just as they neared the city limits, Tony asked, “How is Mother?”
“Fine,” Oliver said.
It was the first time they had mentioned Lucy between them in two years.
Lucy came to the Pennsylvania Hotel bar five minutes before six. Keeping an obscure and unvoiced bargain with herself, she was always on time now and never kept Oliver waiting when they went out together or had an appointment to meet each other. The bar was full of commuters catching a last drink or two before getting their trains to New Jersey or Long Island, and there was a sign that announced that unescorted ladies would not be served at the bar. She found a table in a corner and ordered a whisky. She sat modestly in her corner, waiting for her husband, looking from time to time without shyness at the men who crowded around the bar, not lowering her eyes when they glanced at her. They looked gray and worn by the day’s work, and they drank greedily, as though they needed the liquor to face the trip home and the evening ahead of them. Freshly bathed and dressed herself, prepared for holiday, she felt a touch of pity and contempt, observing them in their drab, office-staled clothes. She was looking forward to the dinner with Oliver in an Italian restaurant nearby that they both liked. And after that, the night on the train together. She had a childish love of trains and felt cosy and important sleeping in a compartment, listening to the sound of the wheels. And Oliver was a good traveler, attentive and much more talkative and light-hearted when he was away from home.
Then she saw Oliver coming toward her, moving among the crowded tables. She smiled and waved at him. He didn’t smile back. Instead, he halted for a moment, to allow someone who was walking behind him to come abreast of him. The two figures stood there, some thirty feet away, in the narrow aisle between the tables, cigarette smoke drifting lightly around their heads.
Lucy blinked, and shook her head. Impossible, she thought.
Then the two figures advanced toward her and, without realizing what she was doing, she stood up. What a place to see him, she thought. In a bar like this.
Oliver and Tony stopped across the table from her. They stood that way, confronting each other silently.
“Hello, Mother,” Tony said, and she heard that his voice had changed.
“Hello, Tony,” she said.
She looked from one face to the other. Tony seemed wary, but not uneasy or embarrassed. Oliver was regarding her closely, his expression somber, watchful, vaguely threatening.
Lucy sighed, gently. Then she moved out from behind the table and put her arms around Tony and kissed his cheek. He stood there, his hands at his sides, permitting himself to be kissed.
He looks awfully tall and old to be my son, Lucy thought, conscious of the commuters watching the family scene.
“We’re not going South,” Oliver said. “We’re all going home for the week-end.”
It was more than a statement, and she knew it. It was a demand, a question, an assertion of change, a warning.
Lucy hesitated only a moment. “Of course,” she said.
“You two stay here,” Oliver said. “I’ll go across the street and turn in the tickets. I’ll be right back.”
“No,” Lucy said, panicky at the idea of being left alone, so abruptly, with Tony. “It’s terribly noisy and smoky here. We’ll all go together.”
Oliver nodded. “Whatever you say.”
In the station she stood close to Oliver at the ticket window while he wrangled with the man behind the wicket. She kept talking, in a voice which sounded, even to her, high and unnatural and artificially animated. “Well, this changes everything, doesn’t it? We have a huge amount of planning to do. The first thing is to make sure we have something to eat in the house for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. You know what we’ll do … we’ll go down to those wonderful Italian shops on Eighth Avenue, because all the stores’ll be closed tomorrow at home, and we’ll buy a turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce and chestnuts for the dressing …”
“By God,” Oliver said to the man behind the window, “I’m giving you four hours’ notice. That’s enough for any railroad. When you buy a ticket you don’t make a contract for life, do you?”
The man grumbled and said he had to talk to the night manager and he left and could be seen talking, bent over, to a gray-haired man behind a desk, who occasionally glanced up bleakly at the window at which Oliver was standing.
Tony stood silently, listening to his mother, scanning the crowds moving through the station.
“And we’ll go into Schrafft’s,” Lucy went on, still in the high, nervous voice, “and get a pumpkin pie and a mince pie, and we’ll buy some bread for cold turkey sandwiches for tomorrow night. And do you know what I think we ought to do tonight, Oliver …” She paused, waiting for him to answer, but he was glowering at the clerk and the manager and he didn’t reply. “Tonight, let’s eat in Luigi’s, with Tony. Do you like Italian food, Tony?”
Tony turned slowly and looked at her, across the gap of the two years, across the gap in which knowledge of each other’s tastes and manners and idiosyncrasies had disappeared. “I like it all right,” he said, speaking a little more slowly than usual, as if he understood that his mother was going on at a rate and a pitch that was not normal for her and as if, by his own sobriety, he hoped to tone her down.
“Good!” Lucy said, with too much enthusiasm. “It’s your father’s and my favorite restaurant,” she said, offering it to him, offering him, in the same sentence, a picture of shared tastes, marital harmony, friendship. “And then, after that, Oliver, do you know what I think we ought to do with Tony?”
“It’s about time,” Oliver said to the clerk, who had just come back to his station and was unpleasantly counting out the money for the exchanged tickets.
“We ought to go see a show together,” Lucy said. “Do you like the theatre, Tony?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“Do you go often?”
“Once in a while.”
“Maybe we can get into a musical comedy,” Lucy said. “What do you think, Oliver?”
Oliver turned away from the ticket window, after a disapproving grunt of farewell for the clerk. “What’s that?” he asked.
“I was saying,” Lucy said, talking swiftly, as though by the continual froth of her conversation she could keep any of them from taking stock of themselves and each other, “that maybe we could take Tony to a musical comedy. Since it’s a holiday evening and we’re all here in town together and …”
“What about it, Tony?” Oliver asked. “You want to go to the theatre?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Tony. “But if it’s all the same to you, not to a musical comedy. There’s a play I heard about … Thunder Rock. I’d like to see that, if we can get tickets.”
“Thunder Rock,” Lucy said, making a little grimace. “I heard it’s terribly morbid.”
“There’s no sense in wasting time on a musical comedy,” Tony said firmly. “It’d be different if I lived in New York and got to the theatre all the time.”