He touched her cheek lightly with his fingertips, as she had touched him so often when he was a boy, and said, “There’s no need to go to the grave any more, is there?”
He could feel her skin tremble minutely under his fingers. She shook her head gratefully. “No,” she said.
It was nearly midnight when they got back to Paris, and Tony drove directly to his mother’s hotel. He helped her out of the car and walked with her to the hotel entrance. They stopped there, oppressed by the difficulty of saying good-bye.
“Tony,” Lucy said, “I’m only going to be here another day. I wonder if I might come by your apartment tomorrow some time. I’d like to give your son something. A toy.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Don’t think you have to be there, Tony,” she said anxiously. “It’s not necessary.”
“I know,” he said.
“Good,” she said quickly. “I’ll come in the afternoon. What time does he get up from his nap?”
“Three o’clock, I think.”
“I’ll be there at three o’clock,” she said.
Then he knew he couldn’t leave her like that. With a smothered, childish cry, he threw his arms around her and held her tight, feeling the years, with their weight of memory and error, lift convulsively from his shoulders as he clung to her, forgiving her, mutely asking for forgiveness for himself, clutching at her, clutching at whatever might be left to them in the waste of love they had made around them.
She held him to her consolingly, patting his arm, oblivious of the people who passed them curiously on the dark, foreign street.
“Mother,” he said, “do you remember—when I went off at the end of that summer and I asked you what we would say if we happened to see each other—do you remember what you said?”
Lucy nodded, remembering the quiet afternoon and the dark autumn blue of the mountain lake and the boy in the suit that had grown too small for him in the summer. “I said, I guess we say hello.”
Tony pulled gently back from his mother’s embrace and stared into her eyes. “Hello,” he said gravely, “Hello, hello.”
Then they smiled at each other and they were like any other mother and grown son placidly parting after a day in the country.
Lucy looked down at her torn and rumpled dress, at her ripped stockings and scarred knees. “My,” she said, “what a sight! God only knows what the people in the hotel will think I’ve been up to today.” She laughed. Then she leaned over and kissed him matter-of-factly on the cheek, as though she had been kissing him good night every night for twenty years. “Sleep well,” she said, and turned and went into the hotel.
He watched her for a moment, going through the lobby toward the desk, a tall, heavy woman, lonely and showing her age, solid and reconciled and without illusions about herself. Then he got into the car and drove home.
The apartment was dark when he let himself in and he went into the child’s room and stood over his bed, listening to the steady breathing. After a moment or two, the boy awoke and sat up.
“Daddy,” he said.
“I just came in to say good night,” Tony said. “I just left your grandmother and she’s coming here tomorrow to see you after your nap.”
“After my nap,” the boy said drowsily, fixing it against the forgetfulness of sleep.
“She’s going to bring you a toy,” Tony said, whispering in the dark room.
“I want a tractor,” the boy said. “No, a boat.”
“I’ll call her in the morning,” Tony said, “and she’ll bring you a boat.”
“A big boat,” the boy said, lying back on his pillow. “For long voyages.”
Tony nodded over the bed. “A big boat for many long voyages,” he said.
But the boy was already asleep.
Tony went into the bedroom he shared with his wife. Dora was sleeping, too, on her back, breathing steadily, her head thrown back and her two hands up in front of her face, as though she were defending herself. Tony undressed quietly in the darkness and slipped into bed. He lay still for a few moments, thinking, Another day in my life.
Then he turned on his side and gently drew his wife’s hands down from her face and took her in his arms and slept.
Copyright
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1965 by Irwin Shaw
Cover design by Andrea C. Uva
978-1-4804-1241-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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