“Yes, Daddy,” Collins mimicked her in a quivering falsetto. “Oh, the volumes that’re concealed in those two simple words. Yes, Daddy.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, entranced with his own vision of his daughter. “Beware this girl, Son,” he said. “She has her eye on you. I recognize the signs. Consider yourself lucky and beware! The whole senior class of the high school would give up their next year’s allowance for that little Yes, Daddy.”
“Now, Daddy, stop …” Betty said, tapping her father’s hand reprovingly.
“When we went through the stands to our seats this morning,” Collins said, booming, “you could hear the sigh of desire sweeping across the cheering section like the wind through a field of wheat.” He laughed fondly, proud, overt, simple-minded.
Oliver, who was standing by the fire now, next to Tony, laughed, too. Tony looked at him, unamused, icily puzzled.
“Say, Betty,” Collins said, “aren’t you going to a dance tonight?”
“Yes,” the girl said.
“Why don’t you take Tony along with you?” Collins said. “If he’s half the man his daddy is, I’ll bet he’ll be able to show you a thing or two.”
Nervously, Lucy glanced at Tony. He was peering at Collins, studying him, as though Collins were an animal he had never seen before and which he was trying to place in its proper category.
“Well, I’d love to,” Betty said, smiling at Tony, using her medium artillery. “I honestly would. But I promised Chris I’d let him take me and …”
“Chris, Chris!” Collins waved impatiently. “You know you have no use for him. We can’t let Tony just mope around with the old folks on his holiday. Let ’em both take you.”
“Well, of course, that would be lovely,” Betty said, and Lucy was sure the girl was calculating secretly the impact of the moment of her arrival at the dance with a boy on each arm. “If Tony would like to …”
“Of course Tony would like to,” Collins said. “You be at our house at nine o’clock tonight, Son, and …”
“I’m sorry, Sir,” Tony said. “I’m busy this evening.”
He spoke very quietly and it cut into the booming torrent of Collins’ sound, coldly polite, uninterested, a rebuke to the loud and foolish father and the coquettish and triumphant daughter. There was nothing boyish or hesitant about it. It was an adult and chilly snub, fastidiously administered. Betty did not mistake it. She glanced thoughtfully at Tony, annoyed and interested, her face open for a moment, revealed. Then she dropped her eyes, covering up.
Where did he learn to behave like this, Lucy wondered. What has he had to do with girls in the past two years that makes him so sure of himself? And seeing Collins now through Tony’s eyes, she realized, painfully, that as recently as a year ago, Oliver would never have permitted either the man or his daughter to enter the house.
Collins didn’t miss it either. He narrowed his eyes, measuring Tony, understanding antagonism. The room was uneasily silent, the atmosphere strained. Only Tony, of all of them, Lucy felt, was undisturbed. Then Collins patted his daughter’s hand protectively.
“Well,” he said, “you had your chance, Son.” He turned to Oliver. “Didn’t you say something about a drink, Ollie?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Oliver said. “What’ll it be?”
“Martinis,” Collins said. “It’s the only drink for Thanksgiving.” He laughed, emptily, reaching for his wavering assurance.
Oliver started to put the ice into the shaker and open a bottle of gin. They all watched him with exaggerated interest, trying to ignore the breach that Tony had opened between them.
“No, no, no,” Collins said, jumping up. “You’re drowning it in vermouth, lad.” He went over to the bar and took the shaker from Oliver’s hand. “You’ll ruin the holiday, Ollie! Here, let me make it, let the old martini-master get to work.”
“If you want.” Oliver relinquished the gin bottle, too. “We usually drink whisky and I …”
“It’s all in the wrist, all in the wrist, my boy,” Collins said, pouring elaborately, squinting with one eye. “I learned it from an old Indian out in the big woods …”
“I’ll do it.” It was Tony. He had moved, unhurried, between the two men, and he took the shaker from Collins’ hand.
Collins stood there, his mouth open foolishly, his hand still curved in the position it had been in when he was holding the shaker.
“In this house, Mr. Collins,” Tony said, “we supply our own bartenders.”
Calmly, Tony poured the gin and the vermouth and began to mix the drink, staring at Oliver, rebuking him silently and pitilessly.
“Sure, sure …” Collins said. He shrugged, disciplined, wanting to react, not knowing just how. He went back to the couch and sat down, dismissed.
Tony stood next to the bar, stirring, ignoring Collins, looking steadily and contemptuously at his father. Oliver met his eye briefly, smiled uncomfortably, and moved away. “Well,” he said, more loudly than was necessary, “that’s the advantage of sending your son to a good school. They teach him to make martinis.”
He laughed, falsely, and Lucy felt she couldn’t stay in the room a moment longer. She sprang up from her chair. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have to go and see that the dinner isn’t burning up.”
She fled into the kitchen, making sure the door was shut tight behind her, so that she wouldn’t hear what they were saying in the living room. She worked distractedly, uselessly, not paying attention to what she was doing, wishing that the day was over, the week-end, the year … Oh, God, she thought, the accidents! Why did they have to meet Collins at the game? Why couldn’t it have been raining, so that they would never have left the house? Why did Oliver have to invite him over? Why did I let him kiss me? Why does Oliver let him call him Ollie?
She put the turkey on the platter and the sweet potatoes around it and the gravy in a boat and the cranberry sauce in a bowl. Then she sat down next to the window, staring out at the graying afternoon, her hands folded desolately in her lap, waiting until she heard the voices die down in the living room, and a few minutes later, the sound of Collins’ car going off down the street.
Then she carried the holiday turkey into the dining room, smiling almost correctly, crying, “Dinner, dinner,” knowing that nothing was going to be any good.
Tony hardly talked during the meal and Oliver talked too much, drinking almost a whole bottle of wine, and making a rambling speech about politics and taxes and the possibility of war, speaking with his mouth full of food, looking over their heads, not waiting for answers.
After the meal was over, Oliver said he had promised Collins he was going to walk over to his house for a brandy. He asked Tony and Lucy if they wanted to go with him and seemed relieved when Tony said, “No,” and Lucy said that she was tired and wanted to take a nap.
Oliver went out of the house, humming, loudly, a march that the high-school band had played between the halves that morning. For a moment, left alone at the cluttered table with Tony, Lucy thought that, finally, she could talk to him, and, by saying the exact, right word, cure them all. But Tony’s face was still and removed and she got up from the table and said, “Leave everything, I’ll clear it up later,” and went up to her bedroom without looking back.
She lay down on the bed and dozed a bit, pursued by dreams, and doors seemed to open and close in her dreams and there were steps in a shadowy, distant hallway and a final soft thud of a faraway door shutting.
When she woke, unrefreshed, she went down to the living room and it was without surprise that she saw the note on the library table. She picked it up and took the note out of the envelope and read, still unsurprised, in Tony’s handwriting, that he had decided that it would be better if he went back to school.