18
THEY DROVE IN SILENCE, through the brilliant noon light, in Tony’s small, black two-seater car. The top was down and the wind, blowing gustily across them, would have made it difficult to speak, even if they had wanted to. Tony drove carelessly and too fast and chickens went scurrying off the road before them as they passed the old stone farmhouses and in the towns people stared at them, reproaching them for being Americans and for traveling so fast. Black and white cattle grazed in the green fields and for long stretches the road curved between tall graceful parentheses of poplars that sent back the noise of the car’s passage as a soft, repetitious whoosh, like cloth-muffled drums being played nervously, in an obsessed rhythm, in a distant room.
There is no need to hurry, Lucy wanted to say, sitting uncomfortably in the wind, her hair wrapped in a scarf, feeling that she was too old for such a vehicle and that much speed. No need to hurry. He has been there for eleven years, he can wait another hour.
They passed family groups picnicking along the roadside, seated on chairs at collapsible small tables with cloths on the tables and wine bottles and tiny vases of flowers next to the long loaves of bread. From time to time they passed through shell-marked villages where ruined walls stood, softened by the weather, looking as though they had been that way for hundreds of years. Lucy tried to think of what the houses had looked like before the shells had hit and what it must have been like at the moment of impact, with the stone flying and the smoke and the people calling to one another from under the collapsing walls. But she couldn’t manage it. The ruins looked permanent, peaceful, undangerous—the picnickers, with their wine bottles and carnations and tablecloths looked as though they had never missed a summer. Where was I, she thought, when this belfry toppled into this stone square? I was preparing lunch in a kitchen three thousand miles away. I was walking across the linoleum to the electric toaster and opening the refrigerator door to take out two tomatoes and a jar of mayonnaise.
She looked across at her son. His face was expressionless, his eyes set on the road. He paid no attention to the picnickers or to the residue of war. If you live in Europe, Lucy thought, I suppose you become accustomed to ruins.
She felt exhausted. Her forehead ached dully from the repetitious, liquid blows of the wind and her eyelids kept drooping heavily over her eyes. Her stomach felt knotted and the top of her girdle bit into her flesh and it was difficult to move enough in the small leather seat to relieve the pressure. From time to time there was the taste of nausea, induced by weariness, in her throat, and when she looked over at Tony he seemed to be swimming minutely at the wheel.
There is something I should be able to say, she thought confusedly, to change him from a stranger into a son, but I am too tired to think of it.
She closed her eyes and dozed, passing swiftly between the fresh fields and the weathered ruins.
Well, now, Tony kept thinking, well, now. Here she is at last. If you have a mother it is too much to hope for that she will not finally put in an appearance.
He glanced over at her. Sleeping comfortably, he thought, happily digesting the day’s emotion, placidly nourishing herself on death, reunions, tears and guilt. Still pretty, even in the scarf and the harsh light, still—at fifty-three, fifty-four?—with that sliding hint of sex and invitation that he hadn’t recognized when he was a boy, but which in retrospect, and after knowing so many other women, he now could recognize so well. Still robust, with firm shoulders and a shapely bosom and clear skin and those damned long gray Eastern eyes. How long would she stay, he wondered, before going home again. A week, two weeks? Long enough to damage him and to try her hand at the French, to whom a woman in her fifties, especially one who looked like her, was interesting game. Long enough to open wounds, demand grief, claim kinship, visit graves, produce tears, disturb security, flirt in a new language, sample foreign beds …
We sat at my father’s grave and made the summer air over the crosses ring with dirty stories. We stopped the sport car at the spot where the bullet hit him and remembered that he was a fool. On the road to the summer resorts we left our tire marks in the dried blood, and winking, repeated the gag line of the joke. It is men’s night and women’s night at the smoker in the military cemetery and we amused the ghosts steadily for eighteen short years. We tore the white flag up into bedsheets and slept in comical surrenders. It is the height of the tourist season and all over the Continent, Mama and Mama’s boy are visiting the monuments. To the left we have Mont Saint Michel. To the right, observe disaster. Diagonally, at a point close to the interesting fourteenth-century Norman church, which unfortunately was hit in an air raid, notice the ditch into which Papa rolled when the machine gun hit him. He was a firm believer in the Geneva Convention, Papa, who should have been wiser about conventions.
Regard Mama’s boy at the wheel. The car is smart, though inexpensive, and is used extensively by photographers who wish to make pictures of people on holiday. In a pinch, it is suitable for funerals, if the funerals have taken place long enough ago in the past. The expression on the face of Mama’s boy is also smart, although, unlike the automobile, it did not come cheaply.
Lucy opened her eyes. “Are we nearly there?” she asked.
“Another two hours,” Tony said. “Go back to sleep.”
Lucy smiled tentatively, half-awake, then closed her eyes again. Tony glanced across at her again momentarily, then stared once more at the road. It was narrow and humped in the middle and its surface had been roughly repaired many times and the car jolted as it hit the filled-in places. There was a smell of tar, melting stickily at the road edges in the sun.
How easy it would be, Tony thought, squinting at the heat waves rising from the middle distance, to speed up just a little more and, with one turn of the wheel, slam off the road into a tree. How easy. How definite.
He grinned, thinking of his mother sleeping trustingly at his side. That would teach her, he thought, not to pick up rides with strange men. He stared at the heat waves, shimmering and oily on each small rise of the road, disappearing like mist as the car rushed on.
The grave waits, he thought. The scene of the death is two hours away by small, open car. This is the spot on which my father was killed … But is it, really? Or was he killed long before he reached the crossroads, on another continent, except that the deed was done quietly and none of the participants, including the victim, admitted to it until a long time later? It isn’t as simple as it seems, Tony thought, to fix the point in time and space in which a father dies.
His eyes on the road ahead of him, Tony thought of the last time he saw his father.
He was twenty years old and it was in New York, and the evening started at a bar near Madison Avenue, and his father was standing with a glass in his hand, looking fit and soldierly in his uniform, with the ribbon from the First World War on it.
It was about seven o’clock and the room was full, with many uniforms and well-dressed women with fur coats who looked as though they were pleased there was a war on. It was cold and rainy outside and people came in rubbing their hands, hurrying a little, showing how happy they were to be in a warm place, with a war on and a drink coming up. There was a pianist in a corner, playing songs from Oklahoma. Pore Jud is daid, he played, singing it softly.
Oliver had called Tony at the dormitory about an hour before, sounding jovial and a little mysterious, saying, “Tony, you better drop everything and come and have dinner with your old man. It may be the last chance you get.”
Tony hadn’t known that his father was anywhere near New York. The last he’d heard Oliver had been down South somewhere. After he had received his commission in Intelligence, because the only thing he’d been offered in the Air Force had been a desk in Washington, Oliver had wandered inconclusively around training camps for two years, appearing on leaves from time to time in New York, without warning, for a dinner or two, then disappearing once more to some new station. When he thought of it, Tony was sure that his father would never get out of the country, but would greet the armistice foolishly and uselessly in an officers’ club in the Carolinas or in a troop train heading slowly toward the Middle West.