At what birthday, he thought, do I escape my son?
He looked up across the bottle of cold wine that the waitress had set on the table and saw Lucy coming out of the restaurant, her hair in order, her scarf trailing from her hand. He noticed the two men watching her again above the red claws on their plates, interested, involuntarily and automatically pleased with the sight of the tall, handsome, well-dressed woman, freshly combed and washed, falsely youthful in the flattering summer light and shadow of the arbor, moving toward the table at the end of the garden at which a young man awaited her. Wreathed in lust, Tony thought sardonically, garlanded everlastingly with desire, my mother approaches.
He stood up and helped her with her chair and poured them both a glass of the wine. They made no toast as they took the first sips.
“Well, now, that’s better,” Lucy said, drinking thirstily, feeling the wine working at the dust of the road in her throat. She looked across at Tony and was conscious again of the grimace of amusement, the twist of irony and rejection on his lips that had disturbed her so profoundly in the living room of his apartment that morning. It froze her and made it impossible for her to speak naturally, and her plan of being easy and matronly and superficial, waiting for a sign of compassion or affection from him before making any demands on him, now seemed naive and hopeless to her.
She was uncomfortable and ate quickly, without speaking or noticing what was placed before her. Nervously she drank most of the bottle of wine herself, unaware that Tony was keeping her glass full, with the solicitous and humorous malice of a roué debauching a child.
The wine was cold and dry, and her thirst seemed unquenchable and she was grateful when Tony ordered another bottle. It was very light, and aside from making everything about her stand forth with pleasant clarity, she was sure it was having no effect on her.
By the time they were halfway through the second bottle, she seemed to be floating off at a little distance, viewing the scene coolly, seeing a mother and son, linked by their good looks, gravely polite with each other, sitting in a Norman garden, enjoying each other’s company, civilized and reticent, decently on their way, long after the guns had been silenced, to pay their respects to their dead. Only, if you blinked a little, and pushed back the wine, and looked a little more closely, there was something wrong with the scene. The fixed smile on the man’s face, which at a distance would pass for an expression of indulgence and filial attentiveness, dissolved upon inspection into mockery, opened a gulf, denied love, was a tortured grin from the darkness of an abyss.
“Intolerable,” she said, putting her glass down, staring at him.
“What’s that?” Tony asked, surprised.
“Tell me,” she said, “what’s your opinion of me?”
“Now, really,” he protested, “I haven’t had the time really to form one.”
“You’ve had the time,” she said, her tongue slippery and a little thick with the wine. “I can see it in your face. You have a good, big, interesting opinion, and I’m interested to hear it.”
“Well …” Tony leaned back in his chair, deciding to humor her. “I must say I’ve been admiring you all day.”
“Admiring me?” Lucy asked harshly. “Why?”
“For remaining so young and beautiful and lively,” he said, smiling at her. “It’s very clever of you.”
“Clever,” she repeated, knowing that he meant to hurt her with that “clever,” and knowing that he had succeeded.
“I can’t help wondering how you’ve managed it,” he said, his tone light.
“Your wife asked me the same question.”
“I must ask her what you told her,” he said.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” Lucy said. “You tell her. I’m sure you have a theory about it.”
“Perhaps I do,” he said. They were staring across the table at each other, hostile, ready to do harm.
“Tell me,” Lucy said. “Maybe the right answer will do me a lot of good in the next twenty years.”
“Well,” Tony began, thinking, She asked for it, she came here, she dug it all up again, she yearned to see the grave, let her hear it. “Well, I was thinking along rather old-fashioned lines, I’m afraid. The wicked thrive, I was thinking. Youth lingers for the hard of heart. Sin and flourish. Remain untouched and families can crumble around you, empires crash, and not a hair in your head will turn gray.”
“Untouched.” Lucy shook her head dazedly. “So that’s what you’ve been thinking, all these years.”
“Only in the figurative sense, of course,” Tony said, smiling crookedly.
There was silence at the table for a moment, while they both were caught in the chilly echo of Tony’s gibe.
“You miscalculate on yourself, Tony,” Lucy said gently. “You think of yourself as a mean and unpleasant man and, naturally, you try to live up to that picture of yourself. I don’t believe you really are, though. I know what you were like as a boy and the boy couldn’t have vanished completely, no matter what’s happened. I know about miscalculation, Tony, because I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to repair the damage I did by being all wrong about myself. All wrong. All wrong … Accidents and errors,” she said, her voice loose and musical and a little thick from the wine. “Accidents and errors. If that nasty little girl hadn’t been at the lake that summer, if she hadn’t been bored on a gray afternoon and decided to take a walk through the woods—if the sun had come out and she’d gone swimming, or if you’d just arrived a half hour later—we wouldn’t be here like this today. If you hadn’t been sick and nearly died your father would never have thought he had to hire a young man to take care of you … If he hadn’t gone into a garage one morning and found out that I hadn’t paid a bill that I thought I’d paid, and if he hadn’t called me up to scold me about it and made me feel rebellious and small … Nothing would’ve happened. Nothing.” She shook her head, seeming to wonder at the complex and malicious windings of fate which had overthrown her life. “But it was a gray day and there was a nasty little girl and there was a young man and you didn’t arrive a half hour later. So something that might have been only a single, rather foolish, unnecessary excursion—the sort of thing that happens to millions of women, and finally fades away into a harmless secret that they look back at indulgently in their old age—turned into a disaster. A watershed. To divide my life and yours, and your father’s.”
“That’s too easy,” Tony said, hating his mother for remembering everything so clearly. “You’re letting yourself off too easy.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t think that. Never think that. Everybody’s responsible for his own accidents and I stand behind mine. Only nobody avoids accidents, of one kind or another. You mustn’t expect that you’re going to get off without them. It’s what you do with them, how you come out of them, how you repair the damage, that’s important. Well, I did the worst possible thing. I made my accident permanent. I made every mistake in the book. After fifteen years of marriage, I enjoyed a young man for a couple of weeks in the summertime, so I decided I was a sensual woman. Well, it turned out I wasn’t. I was afraid of your father and I lied to him and the lie was an ugly one and I was caught in it, and ashamed of it, so I decided that from then on we could only survive by candor. Well, we didn’t survive. You were the witness and you were hurt and you had hurt us, so I decided to make the hurt irreparable. Your testimony was too painful to listen to that year so I sent you away. And your absence testified against us, more and more damningly, every year …”