Lucy Crown

by Irwin Shaw

  He opened the envelope and read the letter. It was short and without apologies. All she said was that she was going to leave him, because she couldn’t bear living any longer in the same house with Tony and him. And when she signed it, she didn’t say, Love, or anything like that. Just Lucy.

  There was no information about how Tony was, no inquiries about him or what he had decided, no hesitation or offers. It was like no letter she had ever sent before, and if it hadn’t been for the handwriting, it would have been hard to believe that Lucy had written it.

  That afternoon, he called Sam Patterson and asked him to come to dinner that night. The good thing about Sam was that there never was any problem about seeing him alone. All Sam ever did was tell his wife he wasn’t going to be home to dinner, and that was the end of it. Maybe Sam had the secret, Oliver thought, maybe he was the man to ask about marriage.

  They had dinner at a hotel, with a bottle of wine, and Oliver found himself enjoying it and eating a great deal, after the ten days of cooking for himself. They talked lightly all through dinner, in the kind of conversational shorthand that develops between friends who have known each other many years, and it was only when the dishes had been cleared away and the coffee set down before them that Oliver said, “Sam, the reason I asked you to have dinner with me is that I need advice. I’m in trouble and I have to make a decision and maybe you can help me …”

  Then, sipping his coffee, not looking at Patterson, Oliver told him the whole story, the call from Tony, the arrival at the lake, Tony’s outburst, Lucy’s denial and accusation of Tony, Bunner’s confession, everything.

  He spoke slowly and evenly, without emotion or shading, methodically presenting all the facts to Patterson, like a responsible witness making a deposition after an accident, like a doctor giving the symptoms of a puzzling case to a specialist who has been called in for consultation.

  Patterson listened silently, showing nothing on his face, thinking, I don’t know another man who would make such a dry, accurate, well-organized report out of his life’s convulsion like this. He is making love, desire and betrayal sound like a paper to be read before an historical society on a minor treaty of the eighteenth century. At the same time, listening impassively, Patterson could not help feeling an unworthy twinge of jealousy. If she finally was going to choose somebody, he thought, why couldn’t she have chosen me?

  And mixed with all this was a helpless flavor of satisfaction. Oliver, who before this had never asked help or advice from anyone. Oliver, the most self-sufficient and reticent of men, was coming to him for aid in his moment of pain and doubt. It made Patterson feel more important in Oliver’s company than he had ever felt before, and at the same time seemed to open some new gate of affection and compassion for his friend. Finally, he thought, no friendship is complete until your friend turns to you in despair.

  Seated in the corner of the restaurant, their table removed from the other diners, Patterson listened carefully to the measured, fastidious voice of his friend. I must get all the facts straight, he thought, almost as if he were going into an operating room where the slightest haziness or misunderstanding might mean the difference between life and death; this is one time I must not say or do the wrong thing.

  “… It never occurred to me,” Oliver was saying, “that anything like this could ever happen to us. It’s just unbelievable.”

  Patterson smiled inwardly to himself, although no sign of it showed on his face. Friend, he thought, out of his different experience, it is never unbelievable.

  “And the way it happened,” Oliver went on. “The damned commonplace way it happened. With the twenty-year-old tutor! It’s like a joke you hear at a smoker!”

  I will warn Lucy, Patterson thought sardonically, to make it more original the next time. Pick a hunchback, or the governor of a Southern state, or a Negro drummer. Her husband has an aversion to the obvious.

  “When women are ready to pick someone,” Patterson said, “they choose from the available material. Literary precedents have very little to do with it. At a moment like that, nobody thinks of herself as a character in an off-color joke.”

  “What do you mean, ready to pick someone?” Oliver said harshly. “Did you ever think that Lucy was ready to pick someone?”

  “No,” Patterson said honestly. “Not until now.”

  “And now …”

  Patterson shrugged. “Now, after it’s happened,” he said, “it’s not altogether surprising.”

  “What do you mean by that?” There was hostility in Oliver’s voice.

  “Adultery,” Patterson said mildly, “is the upper-middle-class American woman’s form of self-expression.”

  For a moment, Oliver seemed angry. Then he laughed. “I see I came to the right man,” he said. “Okay, Philosopher. Continue.”

  “All right,” Patterson said. “Try to look at it from her point of view for a few minutes. What have you done with her since your wedding day …?”

  “I’ve done a hell of a lot,” Oliver broke in. “I’ve taken care of her every minute for fifteen years. Maybe it might sound crass, and I don’t suppose I’d ever say it to her, but she’s lived damned well and she’s never had to worry about anything and no matter how tough it was for me from time to time, I never said a word to her. Christ, she’s pretty nearly the only woman in the country who hardly even knew there was a Depression. To this day she can’t keep a checkbook straight or remember to pay the electric company on time. I’ll tell you what I did for her—I took full responsibility for her,” he said angrily, as though Patterson were Lucy’s representative and was arguing her case. “She’s thirty-five years old and she hasn’t the faintest notion of how tough it is to be alive in the twentieth century. For fifteen years she’s been living like a schoolgirl on a holiday. Don’t ask me what I’ve done for her. What’re you nodding about like that … ?”

  “Exactly,” Patterson said. “Just what I said.”

  “What do you mean, just what you said?” Oliver’s voice was beginning to rise.

  “Now don’t get angry with me,” Patterson said good-humoredly. “I haven’t slept with any college boys.”

  “That’s a damned poor joke,” said Oliver.

  “Look,” said Patterson, “you’ve come to me for help, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” Oliver said. “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, the only way I know how to help,” Patterson said, “is to try to figure out why she finally did something like this.”

  “I know why,” Oliver said angrily. “She’s a …” He stopped and shook his head. Then he sighed. “No, she’s not at all. Go on. I’ll keep quiet.”

  “You made all the decisions,” Patterson said. “You took her away from her work …”

  “Her work.” Oliver made a contemptuous sound. “Messing around in a smelly laboratory for an old idiot by the name of Stubbs. You ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “Neither has anyone else. If she worked with him for twenty years, maybe they’d have produced one paper, proving that algae were green.”

  Patterson chuckled.

  “You laugh,” Oliver said. “But it’s true. What the hell, it wasn’t like tearing Galileo away from his telescope. The human race was going to survive just the same, whether or not she went into that laboratory five mornings a week. She wasn’t so different from all the other girls. She fiddled around, pretending to have a career, waiting to get married. The cities’re full of them.”

  “That’s another thing,” Patterson said. “I talked to her. She hated leaving New York.”

  “If every woman who couldn’t live in New York felt she had to betray her husband in consequence …” Oliver began. He shook his head angrily and drained the last of the wine from his glass. “And what about me?” he asked. “Do you think I wanted to come here to live?” he asked. “Do you think I wanted to be saddled with the printing business? That was the meanest day of my life, when I came up here after my father died and
looked at the books and saw that the whole thing was going to collapse if I didn’t take hold. For ten years,” he said, “every time I’ve gone through the gate of the plant, I’ve felt myself growing rigid with boredom. But I haven’t taken it out on my wife …”

  “The difference is,” Patterson said gently, “that you made the decision. And she had to follow.”

  “God, it was over ten years ago!”

  “You can build up a good case of regret in ten years,” Patterson said. “You can get to feel real useless in ten years.”

  “Useless!” Oliver was making little balls of bread crumbs and flicking them brusquely against the wine bottle. “She had the boy to take care of, the house …”

  “Would you be satisfied just taking care of a little boy and a house all your life?” Patterson asked.

  “I’m not a woman.”

  Patterson grinned.

  “What is a man supposed to do?” Oliver asked. “Set up a Female WPA? Interesting projects,” he said sardonically, “for women who have nothing to do between three and five in the afternoon.” He looked at Patterson suspiciously. “How do you know so much?” he asked. “Has she been filling your ear?”

  “No,” Patterson said. “She didn’t have to.”

  “What about your own wife?” Oliver said, attacking. “What about Catherine?”

  Patterson hesitated. “Catherine is a lost, placid soul,” he said. “She gave up hope when she was nineteen.” He shrugged. “Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe I don’t know her at all. Maybe she’s writing pornographic novels in the attic. Maybe she has a string of lovers from here to Long Island Sound. We don’t communicate enough for me to find out. It’s a different kind of marriage,” he explained regretfully, concealing his envy of his friend. “There’s nothing she or I could do that could possibly make either of us angry.” He smiled crookedly. “Or even mildly disturbed.”

  “Why’ve you kept it up so long, then?” Oliver demanded. “Why didn’t you quit?”

  Patterson shrugged again. “It hardly seemed worth the trouble,” he said, almost truthfully.

  “Good God,” Oliver said. “Marriage.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, gloomily, two men fixed in contemplation of complexity, waste, cross-purposes. Patterson allowed his mind to wander away from Oliver, and he remembered some of the other problems that he had been confronted with just that day, in the ordinary course of his work, in his own office. Mrs. Sayers, who was only thirty-three years old, but who had five children, and who was suffering stubbornly from anemia and who was tired all the time; so tired, she said, that when she had to get up at six-thirty every morning, to prepare breakfast and take care of the kids, it was like climbing up on the cross, she said, and she meant it. And nothing, as far as Patterson could see, to be done about it. And Mr. Lindsay, who was a machinist, and whose hands were so crippled with arthritis that he could barely hold his tools, and the effort of trying to hide it from the foreman so great that the sweat broke out on his face from the minute he entered the shop until long after he got home at night. And nothing to be done about it. And the woman who had come into his office three months’ pregnant, only her husband had been in Panama for six months. All the routine, random misery, and ailments that the human race casually pushed across a doctor’s desk every day of the week. And a step removed from that—the newspaper tragedies—the men who were going into battle in Spain, and who would be dead or broken by tomorrow evening, and the people being hunted down and destroyed all over Europe …

  By any objective scale, Patterson thought, Oliver’s pain must be minute and inconsiderable. Only no man calculated his agony against an objective scale, and a thousand deaths on another continent finally were likely to weigh less in a man’s private balance than his own toothache.

  No, Patterson corrected himself, it’s not fair. There was also the question of tolerance of injury to be considered. The threshold of pain varied enormously—one man might suffer an amputation with nothing more than a stoical grunt, while another might go into shock with a crushed finger. Perhaps Oliver was a man with a low threshold of pain when the injury was infidelity.

  “Self-expression,” Oliver was saying thoughtfully, staring down at his hands spread out on the tablecloth.

  “What?” Patterson asked, forgetting for a moment.

  “Your theory,” Oliver said.

  “Oh, yes,” Patterson said, smiling. “Of course, you must remember it’s just a theory and I haven’t kept any scientific checks …”

  “Go on,” Oliver said.

  “Well, with a man like you,” Patterson said, “who insists upon making all the decisions at all times, for everybody …”

  “It’s not because I want to,” Oliver protested. I’d be delighted if other people would take the responsibility. But people just diddle around …”

  Patterson grinned. “Exactly. Well, after a few years like that, it seems to me that a woman’d begin to feel that the thing she wanted most, the thing she just had to do—would be to make one big important decision by herself. And you’d closed all the other fields to her—you told her where she was to live and how she was to live and how she was to bring up her son—By God, I remember now, you even told her what the menus should be for dinner.”

  “I have special tastes in food,” Oliver said defensively. “I don’t see why I can’t eat what I want in my own house.”

  Patterson laughed, and a second later, Oliver laughed, too. “Hell,” he said, “I must have some reputation around this town.”

  “Well, it is true, you’re considered a man who knows his own mind, Oliver.”

  “If she had so many objections,” Oliver said, “why didn’t she speak up? Nobody’s under a vow of silence in our house.”

  “Maybe she was afraid to. Or maybe she didn’t know she had: the objections until this summer.”

  “Until a twenty-year-old boy came along,” Oliver said sullenly, “who doesn’t have to shave more than twice a week and who hasn’t got anything better to do than lounge around a lake all summer, playing with married women.”

  “Maybe,” Patterson said astringently.

  “At least,” Oliver said, “if it was a grand passion—if she was in love with him, if she was ready to make some sacrifices for him! But he told me himself—she laughed at him when he asked her to marry him! It’s so damn frivolous!”

  “I can’t help you there,” Patterson said. “And I think, in the long run, you’re going to be glad it was frivolous.”

  Oliver tapped the table impatiently. “And then, to top it all,” he said, “she had to be so inept. Letting the boy see her.”

  “Oh,” Patterson said, “children see worse things than that. They see their parents being cowardly, or cruel, or crooked …”

  “It’s easy for you to talk,” Oliver said. “You don’t have a son.”

  “Send him away to school for a couple of years,” Patterson said, ignoring what Oliver had just said, “and he’ll forget it. Children forget everything.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure,” said Patterson, being glib.

  “I’ll have a lot of things to forget, too.” Oliver sighed.

  “Grownups forget everything, too,” Patterson said.

  “You know you’re a liar,” said Oliver.

  Patterson smiled. “Yes.”

  “Then what’re you talking like that for?”

  “Because I’m your friend,” Patterson said soberly, “and I know you want to take her back, and I want to give you all the reasons why you should, even if they’re lousy reasons.”

  “Some day,” Oliver said sarcastically, “when you’re in trouble, make sure to come to me for advice.”

  “I’ll do that,” Patterson said.

  “So—what do you think I ought to do?” Oliver asked. “Practically?”

  “Go up there tomorrow and be noble,” Patterson said promptly. “Forgive her. Take her to your bosom. Tell her you know she’ll be a paragon among
st wives from now on. Tell her you’ll let her arrange her own menus from now on …”

  “Leave out the jokes,” Oliver said.

  “Don’t send her off in the summer by herself any more.”

  “She didn’t want to stay up there,” Oliver remembered. “She begged me to take her back with me. If I let her, she’d hang around my neck twenty-four hours a day.”

  “There you are,” Patterson said.

  “It’s so damned complicated. And what can I tell Tony?”

  “Tell him it was an accident,” said Patterson. “A grown-up accident, that he’s too young at the moment to understand. Tell him you’ll explain everything when he’s twenty-one years old. Tell him to be a good boy at school and stop looking through windows.”

  “He’s going to hate us,” Oliver said, peering down into his cup. “He’s going to wind up hating both of us.”

  There was nothing to be said to this and Patterson didn’t try. They sat in silence for a moment, then Oliver called for the check. “This is on me,” he said, when Patterson tried to take it. “Payment for professional services.”

  On the way out of the hotel, Oliver sent a telegram to Lucy, telling her to pack and be ready, he was coming up to get her the next afternoon.

  13

  “ARRIVING AROUND THREE O’CLOCK, tomorrow,” the telegram had read. “Please have everything packed and be ready to leave immediately. Wish to make as much of the trip in daylight as possible. Oliver.”

  Lucy had re-read the telegram a half dozen times. She had been tempted to telephone Oliver, but had decided against it. Let him come, she had thought. Let it be settled, once and for all.

  After the night of Oliver’s visit, Lucy had stayed in the cottage, numbly forcing herself to go through the routine of holiday with Tony, waiting, in the beginning, for something to happen, some message, some event which would push her one way or another, bring the season to a climax, disastrous, or violent if need be, but punctuating her life, finishing one section, marking the beginning of another.