“God, it smells good in here,” Oliver said. He had obviously enjoyed his morning and he was smiling and full of energy and the nervousness and somber watchfulness of the night before had vanished. He only glanced at her briefly but she could tell that he was pleased with her. Perhaps it wasn’t all quite real—perhaps it was all prepared and staged, his glance told her, but it was well staged.
“We met Fred Collins and his daughter at the game,” Oliver said, standing in front of the fire, “and I invited them up here for a drink on the way home. They’ll be here in a minute. Is the ice out?” He looked over at the silver ice bucket on the sideboard that they used as a bar.
“Yes,” Lucy said, satisfied with herself because she had thought of that, too, because today she was thinking of everything. She smiled up at the two of them, standing side by side in front of the fire, in their tweeds and flannel trousers, the boy almost as tall as the father, filling the room with a sense of the crisp holiday outdoor morning. Tony looked at home, as though he was familiar with every corner of the room, as though he had lived here a long time and could move about the house carelessly and without strangeness.
“Did you like the game?” Lucy asked.
“It was a pretty good game,” Tony said.
“There’s a fullback who’s going to go places in college, if they don’t break his neck for him first.”
“Do you like football?” Lucy said.
“Uhuh,” said Tony. “As long as I’m not expected to root for anybody.”
Oliver gave Tony a swift, searching look, and Lucy thought, I must stop asking him direct questions about himself. The answers always are a little queer, and not what you would really want to hear from your son. Disturbed, she stood up and went over to the bar and fussed, getting out glasses, with her back to Oliver and Tony. She was relieved when the doorbell rang a few seconds later and Oliver went to the front hall to let in Fred Collins and his daughter.
There was a kind of roaring at the front door because Fred Collins talked like that. He came from Oregon and he had the notion that the way you demonstrated the virtues of the primitive and open-handed West was to talk at the top of your voice at all times. He was a big man with a crushing handshake and he still affected a wide-brimmed, vaguely Texan kind of felt hat and he drank a good deal and organized poker games and he was always taking Oliver off to go hunting for deer and birds. Twice a year he discovered prize fighters who would make everybody forget Joe Louis and he had once taken Oliver all the way out to Cleveland to watch his current discovery get knocked out in three rounds by a Puerto Rican. Although she had never seen him put to the test, Lucy believed that he was generous and good-hearted and she was grateful to him for taking Oliver off so many evenings of the year and on the protracted trips to hunting camps and distant arenas.
He had a pretty, rather washed-out-looking wife whom he called Sweetheart and whom he treated with the cumbrous gallantry of a bear in the zoo. His daughter Betty was only fifteen years old, small, honey-colored, confident of herself, coldly coquettish, and, as Lucy described her privately, ripening daily into wickedness. Even Oliver, who was among the least susceptible of men, confessed that when Betty Collins came into a room, she made him uncomfortable.
“I’m telling you, Ollie,” Collins was saying, his words clearly discernible in the living room, “that boy is a find. Did you see the way he cut back when they piled up in front of him at the tackles? He’s a natural.” In the autumn, Collins supplemented his discoveries of fighters who would make everybody forget Joe Louis by discoveries of backs who would make everybody forget Red Grange. “I’m going to write my old coach at Oregon and tell him about this boy, and maybe get to him with an offer. We could use him out there.” Collins had left college more than twenty years before, and he hadn’t been back in Oregon for more than a decade, but his loyalty never wavered. He was also loyal to the American Legion, of which he was an officer, several secret societies, and to the New Jersey State Republican Committee, which was at the moment rocking under the hammer-blows of the Roosevelt dynasty. “Don’t you agree, Ollie?” Collins asked, invisible but loud. “He’d really be something in Oregon, wouldn’t he?”
“You’re absolutely right, Fred,” Lucy heard Oliver murmur, approaching down the hall. Collins was the only person who ever had called him Ollie. It made Lucy wince every time she heard it, but Oliver hadn’t ever complained about it.
The men came into the room, herding Betty in front of them. Betty smiled at Lucy and said, “Hello, Mrs. Crown,” in the voice that, as much as anything else about her, made men uncomfortable in her presence.
Collins stopped melodramatically at the doorway. “By God,” he roared, spreading his arms like a wrestler preparing to grapple an opponent. “What a vision! Now, here’s something really to be thankful for! Ollie, if I was a churchgoing man, I’d go to church this afternoon and praise the Lord for making your wife so beautiful.” He advanced on her, rolling archly. “I can’t resist it, Ma’am, I just can’t resist it,” he shouted, taking her into his arms. “You’re getting prettier every day. Son,” he said to Tony, who was standing at the doorway, watching carefully, “with your permission I’m going to kiss your mother, because it’s a holiday and because she’s the loveliest lady on this side of the Mississippi River.”
Without waiting for an answer from Tony, Collins gripped her tight, the wrestler coming to close quarters, and kissed her loudly on each cheek. Almost smothered by the man’s bulk, Lucy laughed, a little uneasily, permitting herself to be kissed, because if you allowed Collins into the house you had to take him with all his noise and all his rough-hewn and boisterous gallantry. She had a glimpse, past Collins’ head, of Tony. Tony wasn’t looking at her now, but had turned and was watching Oliver with an expression of scientific interest on his face.
Lucy couldn’t see Oliver, and Collins pressed her heartily to his barrel-like chest once more, crying, incomprehensibly, but with the best will in the world, “Venus! Venus!” Then, winking broadly and rolling his head lewdly, he said, in a loud stage whisper, “Baby, my car is waiting, with the motor running. Just say the word and off we go. The first night of the new moon. Watch out for me, Ollie, boy, watch out for me. She brings out my tiger blood.” He roared with laughter and let her go.
“That’s enough, now, Fred,” Lucy said, knowing how ineffectual it must sound in the midst of all that bellowing and lip-smacking. She looked over again at Tony, but his eyes were fixed on his father, coolly, expectantly.
But Oliver didn’t seem to notice. He had seen so much of Collins in the last year that the noise and confusion that surrounded him by now seemed normal, as the sound of a waterfall finally seems almost like silence to people who live next to it.
Collins finally released her and sank expansively onto the couch, pulling his daughter down beside him and fondling her hand in his. “Ah, these cushions feel good,” he said. “Those benches at the game are awfully rough on the derrière.” He beamed with coarse benevolence at Tony. “He’s a fine-looking boy, Lucy. A little stringy so far, eh, Son, but that’s the age for it. When I was your age you may not believe it, but I only weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds, soaking wet.” He laughed loudly, as though what he had said had been irresistibly witty. “We’re glad we finally met the young Crown prince, aren’t we, Honey?” He peered lovingly into his daughter’s eyes.
Betty looked consideringly at Tony, using her lashes. “Yes, Daddy,” she said.