“Do you think it would have been better to keep me with you?” Tony asked, without belief.
“Yes,” she said. “We would have endured. A family is like flesh and bone. When it’s wounded, if it’s given a chance, it knits and heals. But it doesn’t heal if the wound is kept open. We made an institution of the wound, we built our marriage on it, our life, and we paid for it.”
“Paid for it,” Tony said flatly, looking across the table at the robust, healthy, preserved woman, with her unlined face and her youthful mouth, her skin delicately and prettily flushed now by the wine and the sun. “Who paid for it?”
“I know what you think,” she said, nodding. “You think that you’ve paid for it. That your father paid. And that I got off free. But you’re wrong. I paid, too.”
“I can imagine how you paid,” Tony said, unrelenting.
“Yes, you’re right,” Lucy said wearily. “I paid in many beds. But that was a long time ago, and it stopped one night, when your father came home to say good-bye before going to the war.” She closed her eyes, shutting out the sight of her son, remembering herself, bloody and punished, lying against the wall at four o’clock on a winter morning, and the sound of the door closing behind the husband she was never going to see again. “But that wasn’t the only way I paid. I paid in guilt and loneliness and envy.” She opened her eyes and looked across at Tony. “I thought I was all paid up, too, but I see I’m not. Not yet. No matter what you think of me, finally, I suppose you can believe in the guilt and loneliness. But maybe the envy was the worst of all. Because I envied everybody. I envied the women who had placid, uneventful marriages and the women who had uproarious ones, with fights and separations and reconciliations. I envied the women who were thoughtlessly promiscuous and who could take seven men a week and accept them easily and forget them as easily. I envied the women who knew they wanted to be faithful for all the years of the war and never wavered and I envied the women who were swept away by love or by lust and would sacrifice anything, fight anyone, with any weapon, for the men they’d chosen. I envied the women who took it hard and the women who took it easy, because I didn’t know how to take it at all. Around the hospital there were a lot of women and there was a joke they passed among them. They said they belonged to a club that had started in England, because the war had started earlier there. The club was called the M.Y.O.V.A., and the letters meant Making Young Officers Very ’Appy and it was good for a laugh in all circles from 1940 to 1945. I laughed with them and I envied them. And most of all I envied myself. The myself that I had been and the marriage I had had until that summer on the lake. It wasn’t that I had a sentimental view of myself or a false memory of the marriage. There were a lot of things wrong with it and if your father didn’t tell you what they were, listen to me and I’ll tell you now. Your father was a passionate and disappointed man. When he was young, he had high hopes for himself. He loved airplanes and the people who made them and flew them and the business he’d started was full of promise and I suppose he saw himself as a pioneer and experimenter and a power in the land. Then his father died and he had to go back to the business and the town he’d been trying to escape for ten years and he saw himself as a nobody, a failure, and all the passion and disappointment of his life he centered on me. And I was inadequate to it, and I knew it and I resented him and finally I made him suffer for it. He frightened me and he expected too much from me and he directed every move of my life and a good deal of the time he didn’t satisfy me. But I loved him, and, looking back on it now, I see that the marriage balanced out, although I didn’t see it then. I was timid and uncertain and vengeful and I had a low opinion of myself, so I went out looking for a good opinion of myself in the arms of other men. At first I told myself I was looking for love, but it wasn’t so. I didn’t find love and I didn’t find a good opinion. And it wasn’t as though I didn’t try.”
She stopped and rocked a little in her chair, and leaned forward and put her elbows on the table, supporting her chin on the backs of her crossed hands, staring past her son’s head into a confusion of shadowy faces, seeming to hear, in the Norman garden, a hidden murmuring of men’s voices, importuning, chuckling, sighing, whispering, weeping, calling her name, saying, “Lucy, Lucy,” saying, “Dearest,” saying, “I love you,” saying, “It was wonderful” and “Write me every day” and “I’ll never forget you” and, in the obscurity of spent and darkened rooms, “Good night, good night …”
“All manner and conditions of men,” Lucy said, her voice low and without emotion. “There was a lawyer who wanted to give up a wife and three children to marry me, because he said he couldn’t live without me, but he lived without me all right and he has five children now. There was a gay young man who coached the guards and tackles at Princeton and who drank applejack old-fashioneds and I sent a silver cake dish to his wedding. There was an antique dealer who took me to chamber-music concerts all over New York and wanted me to live with him to prevent him from turning homosexual, but I didn’t live with him and he’s living with a Mexican chorus boy now. There was a movie writer on a train and I slept with him because I was drunk and we were getting off the next morning, anyway. There was even a boy who was in your class at Columbia and he told me that you were brilliant and you had no friends and he didn’t think you’d amount to much, in the long run. There was a deck officer of a ship that made cruises of the Caribbean in the wintertime, and he had the body of a dancer and he’d learned a great deal from the ladies who went cruising in those warm waters, and the one time I was with him, while it was happening, it seemed to me that that was what I had been searching for all that time—But when he got up to leave he took too long admiring himself while he was putting his tie on in front of the mirror. I looked across at him, whistling and grinning and snub-nosed and sweating with cheap male confidence in himself, and I knew I was never going to see him again, because he had debased me. He wasn’t a lover preparing to say good-bye, he was a professional athlete, tipping his cap to the public as he crossed home plate. And after that,” she said flatly, “I knew it wasn’t for me. Sensuality is for sensualists and I had made a mistake about myself.
“Then, of course,” she said pitilessly, “there was the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Only by that time I wasn’t looking for anything any more. I was dispensing charity. But it takes talent to be charitable, too, and in the long run, as was to be expected, my amateur benevolence did more harm than good. I hurt the wounded and I left the disconsolate unconsoled. I was a whore for pity, and I insulted men who were on their way to die, because they weren’t looking for whores. They wanted tenderness and reassurance and all I could give them was brisk professional accomplishment. And I insulted myself, because that wasn’t the métier for me and it warped me into something I hated. I became callous and tricky and a liar on the telephone and a coquette in bed and a counterfeiter who squandered all her real wealth in forging, bills that no one finally would accept.
“And at last,” she said, flooding on, not giving Tony a chance to interrupt her, intent, like someone adding a long column of figures, in toting up the account and getting the sum right before turning to other things, “when the moment came to make the big decision, the salvaging decision, when perhaps I could have saved your father and myself with one word, the word I said was the wrong one. Naturally. You have to prepare yourself carefully, for years, you have to understand yourself, to say the right word in a crisis. And I didn’t understand anything and I wasn’t prepared for anything. He was waiting for me in the dark before he sailed for England. It was after three o’clock in the morning and he’d just come from seeing you and he must have heard something of what the lieutenant was saying to me at the door, but not much. And he asked me if I’d let the boy make love to me and I said yes. And he asked me if there had been others and I said yes. And he asked me if there would be others and I said yes. I was proud of myself because I thought I had become strong enough to be honest. But it wasn’t honesty, it was revenge and self-approval. In any case, it wasn’t the ‘yes’ of honesty that was needed between your father and me, it was the intelligent ‘no’ of charity. Only I’d run out of charity by that time, and your father beat me for it, as he should, and went off and got killed.”