by Irwin Shaw
Dora offered her a glass. “At French festivals, in little towns,” she said, “they often drink in the morning. A lot of people are invited and they advertise it in the local newspaper as the Verre d’Amitié, or the Coupe d’Honneur. That’s the glass of friendship,” she translated conscientiously, “or the cup of honor. What should we call this?”
“Well, let me see,” Lucy said, “how about a little bit of both?”
“A little bit of both.” Dora nodded and raised her glass, and they drank. Dora rolled the liquor around on her tongue, considering it. “Now I know why people drink in the morning. It tastes so much more significant in the morning, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” Lucy agreed. The flavor of hostility had vanished and she was beginning to feel very much at home with the girl and approving of her son, at least in this one respect, for having chosen her.
“Now,” Dora said, between sips, “I’ve talked enough about myself and Tony. How about you? What’re you doing here? Touring?”
“Only partly,” Lucy said. “I work for an organization in New York that’s attached, more or less unofficially, to the United Nations. It devotes itself to children. We sort of meddle all over the world, making politicians uncomfortable if they don’t take a proper stand on child-labor and voting credits for schools and making sure all the little citizens are vaccinated and eligible for a few pints of milk a year. And we’re very stern about illegitimate children getting full rights before the law. Things like that.” She spoke lightly, but her pride in the work she was doing and her fundamental seriousness about it were not disguised. “And a lot of money comes our way from people in America, and we decide how it’s to be spent. I’ve been roaming around Europe for five weeks now, looking solemn at meetings and taking notes and patting small dark heads in Greece and Yugoslavia and Sicily. I had a conference last night and everything had to be translated into three languages and it didn’t end till after one A.M. and I was famished when I got back to my hotel, because I missed my dinner. That’s how I happened to go into that place and see Tony …”
“You sound like a very important person,” Dora said, youthfully impressed. “Do you give press conferences and all that?”
“Occasionally.” Lucy smiled. “I’m very strong on birth control.”
“I never did anything,” Dora said absently, twirling her glass. “I didn’t even finish college. I came over here for a vacation in my sophomore year and I met Tony and there went college … It must be a wonderful thing to feel useful.”
“It is,” Lucy said soberly, meaning it.
“Maybe when Tony finally leaves me,” Dora said matter-of-factly, “I’ll take steps to become useful.”
The door from the dining room was slowly pushed open and a small boy’s head appeared, poking out behind it. “Mummy,” the boy said, “Yvonne says this afternoon is her day off and if you say all right she’ll take me to visit her sister-in-law. Her sister-in-law has three birds in a cage.”
“Come in here, Bobby,” Dora said, “and say hello.”
“I have to tell Yvonne,” the boy said. “Right away.” But he came into the room, shyly ignoring Lucy, straight-backed, sturdy, with thoughtful gray reminiscent eyes and a domed, long head. His hair was cut close and he was wearing shorts and a knitted shirt and his bare arms and legs, scarred by the usual mishaps and antiseptics of childhood, were straight and surprisingly strong-looking.
Lucy watched him, feeling dazed, forgetting to smile, remembering what Tony had looked like at that age. Why didn’t she tell me they had a son, Lucy thought, aggrieved and mistrustful once again, feeling that somehow Dora had purposely and with some ulterior motive held back this key piece of information.
“This is your grandmother,” Dora was saying, smoothing the boy’s hair gently. “Say hello, Bobby.”
Silently, his eyes still averted, the boy came over to Lucy and put out his hand. They shook hands gravely. Then, unable to resist it, and at the risk of frightening or offending the boy, Lucy took him in her arms and kissed him. Bobby stood politely, waiting to be released.
Lucy held onto him, not because she wanted to prolong the kiss, but because if she let him go, she was afraid that he would see her crying. Now, suddenly, with her arms around the bony shoulders, with the soft, firm child’s skin under her fingers, the sense of loss, of wasted years, which until then had been only abstract and theoretical, became real, painful, sadly and powerfully fleshed.
She bent her head and kissed the bristly, little-boy’s hair, smelling the dry, fresh, forgotten odor of childhood. She was conscious of Dora watching her.
She took a deep breath and held back the tears. She released the boy, making herself smile at him. “Robert,” she said, “what a nice name! How old are you?”
The boy went back and stood next to his mother, silent.
“Tell your grandmother how old you are, Bobby,” said Dora.
“My grandmother is fat,” the boy said.
“That’s your other grandmother,” Dora said, “that’s the one who was here last year.”
“Four,” the boy said. “My birthday is in the wintertime.”
There was the sound of a key in the lock and footsteps in the hallway. Then Tony came into the room. He stopped when he saw Lucy, and looked, puzzled, politely, not recognizing her for the moment, from her to Dora. He was in the same clothes that he had been wearing the night before and they looked rumpled, as if he had slept in them. He seemed tired and he needed a shave and he blinked once or twice, coming out of the darkness of the elevator shaft into the bright sunlight of the living room. He was carrying a pair of smoked glasses in one hand.
“Daddy,” the boy said, “Mummy says I can go with Yvonne this afternoon to her sister-in-law. She has three birds in a cage.”
“Hello, Tony,” Lucy said. She stood up.
Tony shook his head, quickly, two or three times. “Well, now,” he said softly. He didn’t smile.
“Your mother and I have been having a visit,” Dora said.
Tony’s eyes traveled from their faces to the whisky glasses set down before them. “So I see,” he said. He smiled. But the smile was chilly and withdrawn. “What a nice idea,” he said. He put out his hand and Lucy took it formally. Then he turned to the boy. For a moment, he stood in silence, seeming to be studying his son, puzzled, intense, loving, as though searching for some minute, hidden secret in the soft, pleased, welcoming child’s face.
That’s something she neglected to tell me, Lucy thought. How much he loves his son.
“Robert,” Tony said gravely, “how would you like to be a messenger this morning?”
“It depends,” the boy said cautiously, sensing dismissal.
“How would you like to go in and tell Yvonne that your father would like some bacon and eggs and a large pot of coffee?”
“Then can I come back here?” the boy asked, bargaining.
Tony looked at his wife, then at Lucy. “Of course,” he said. “In fact, we insist that you come back in here.”
“That’s what I’m going to tell Yvonne,” the boy said. “In fact, you insist.”
“Exactly,” Tony said.
The boy ran out of the room toward the kitchen. Tony watched him soberly as he went through the door, then turned back toward Lucy and Dora.
“Well,” he said, “where do we begin?”
“Look,” Dora said, “I think I’d better get out of here. I’ll dress and take Bobby with me and …”
“No,” Lucy said, more loudly than she wanted to speak. The idea of staying alone with Tony in the shabby, provisionally furnished room, waiting for Dora and the boy to leave, was unbearable to her. She needed time and neutral ground. “I think, if you want to see me, Tony, it’d be better if we made it later.”
“Whatever you say,” Tony said agreeably.
“I don’t want to interfere with your schedule …”
“My schedule today,” Tony said lightly, nodding pleasantly at her, “is to
entertain my mother. Still …” He looked around him with a mild grimace of distaste. “I don’t blame you for wanting to get out of here. I’ll tell you what. There’s a bistro on the corner. If you don’t mind waiting a half hour or so …”
“Good,” Lucy said hurriedly. “That’ll be fine.” She turned toward Dora. “Good-bye, my dear.” She wanted to kiss the girl in farewell, but she couldn’t bring herself to make the gesture under Tony’s watchful gaze. “Thank you so much.”
“I’ll take you to the door,” the girl said.
Clumsily, feeling more awkward than she had felt since she was a young girl, Lucy picked up her bag and her gloves and, leaving Tony standing in the middle of the room, looking rumpled, tired, and coldly amused, she followed Dora into the hallway.
Dora opened the door and Lucy hesitated, half in, half out. “Do you want to tell me anything?” she whispered.
Dora thought for a moment. “Be careful,” she said. “Be careful of yourself. Maybe it would even be a good idea if you weren’t waiting in the bistro when he gets there thirty minutes from now.”
Impulsively, Lucy leaned over and kissed the girl’s cheek. Dora didn’t move. She stood there, motionless, waiting, no longer friendly.
Lucy pulled back, and nervously started putting on her gloves.
“You have to walk down,” Dora said. “It’s a French elevator. It only carries passengers going up.”
Lucy nodded and started down the steps. She heard the door close behind her and she walked carefully down in the darkness, her heels making a cold clatter on the stone steps. The vacuum cleaner was still being used somewhere in the building and the jittery, throbbing noise, like giant insects in a dream, pursued her until she reached the street.
17
SHE WALKED AIMLESSLY FOR fifteen minutes, looking at the strange shop windows without really seeing what was in them, then hurried back to the corner of the street on which Tony lived. The bistro was there as he had said and there were several tables on a little terrace outside, under an awning, and she sat down and ordered coffee, to give herself something to do while waiting.
The scene in the apartment had unnerved her. Through the years, she had thought, of course, from time to time, of seeing Tony again, but in her imaginings of the encounter, it had usually been at a moment of drama—with her on her deathbed and Tony summoned to her side, youthful, gentle, forgiving in the face of the ultimate farewell. Then there would be the final expression of love, a last, healing kiss (although the face to be kissed had always stubbornly remained a thin, thirteen-year-old face, browned by the sun of that distant summer)—and then a miraculous recovery and a lasting reconciliation and friendship after it. She had also had a recurrent dream, less frequent in recent years, of Tony standing at her bedside, watching her sleep, saying, in a harsh whisper, “Die! Die!” But the way it had actually happened had been worse than either the bitter dream or the naive deathbed fantasy. It had been so accidental and confused and unpromising. She hadn’t really been certain that she had recognized him at the bar and she had been embarrassed because she was sitting at a night-club table with two college boys whom she had allowed, however innocently, to pick her up. And then there was the unhealthy impression of the shabby apartment and the disappointed wife, with her confessions of unhappiness and her despair for the future. And there had been the unexpected ache of seeing the little boy, with the almost familiar face, the mild, grave, inherited eyes, in a confusion of generations, seeming to condemn her once more across the years, putting a new and heavier burden of responsibility on her all over again. And then Tony himself—prematurely gray, prematurely weary, unpleasantly distant and careless with his wife, incuriously polite, unmoved and cool with herself. It was true, Lucy warned herself, that she might have been influenced by the unappetizing and perhaps distorted picture of Tony that Dora had given her before he came in. There was a good chance that Dora, nursing wifely grudges, especially after a night which her husband had spent away from home, might have misrepresented the case considerably. But even so, and making all allowances for Dora’s possible exaggerations, the impression Tony had made on her was a disturbing one.
And mixed up with it all was the image of her grandson, hopeful and vulnerable, caught between the failures and animosities of his parents, still too young to understand the bitter currents that were twisting his life, but inevitably to be shaped and damaged by them. God, Lucy thought, what will he be like finally? How long does the punishment go on?
Suddenly the memory of Tony’s smile in the disheveled living room, standing there between his wife and mother, his mouth pulled to one side in cynical amusement, seemed hateful and terrifying to her. It seemed to mock her and belittle her and endanger everything she had so carefully built up for herself since the war—the sense of purpose and accomplishment in her work, the feeling of having at last matured, of having come to honorable and rigorous terms with herself, the pride in having overcome accidents, in not being swamped by her faults, of having come into her sixth decade whole, robust and useful. Now, remembering Tony’s smile, all that was shaken, and once more she felt as she had at the end of the summer on the lake—uncertain, ashamed of herself, unloving. Some way, some way, she thought, I must get him to stop smiling like that.
She felt rushed and inefficient and she was frightened of the meeting that was ahead of her. What could she hope to accomplish here, in a few minutes, over a cup of coffee? There was a lifetime to be explained, an abyss to be bridged, and these things were not to be done in a half hour at a bistro table. She needed time, all the time she could get, and an atmosphere different from this ugly little café, with the stained waiters banging glassware in the background and a young man, who needed a shave and who looked as though he were hiding from the police, working on a racing form a couple of tables away.
Nervously, she opened her bag and took out a small mirror to examine her face. It looked anxious to her, and artificial, not her real face, not natural for the occasion. She put the mirror away, and was about to close the bag when she saw the letter she had taken from her valise in the hotel.
She took the letter out of the bag, a plan slowly beginning to form in her brain.
She pulled the letter out of its envelope, four sheets of flimsy paper, thin and almost transparent at the folds. She hadn’t read it in years, and she had only put it in her baggage at the last moment when she left America, not really understanding the impulse behind it, thinking, confusedly, Well, as long as I’m going to be in Europe …
She opened the letter and started reading.
“Dear Mrs. Crown,” the letter began, “I am in the hospital and I take this opportunity of writing to you about your loss.” The paper was stamped with the sign of the Red Cross and the handwriting was cramped, semi-literate, painful. “I suppose you have been notified by the War Dept. about the Major but I was there with the Major and I know that people feel easier in their minds when something like this happens if they hear exactly what took place at the time from someone that was on the spot. The name of the town was Ozières, if the censor don’t cut it out, you never know what they will pass, and I will remember it for a long time because I got hit there, too, excepting that I was lucky since I am a short man and the Major, as you remember, was a very tall man, and the machine gun must of been traversing on the same elevation and while I only got it in the shoulder and the neck (two 30 caliber) the Major, being taller, got hit in the lungs. If it is any consolation, he never knew what hit him. There was a Frenchman, too, but he was very quick and he jumped into the ditch and he never got scratched. I have been reading the papers from back home since I been in the hospital and they make it sound as though it was a parade after the breakthrough, but take it from someone who was in it, it was no parade. I was in a reconnaissance squadron, attached to Corps, we had some half-tracks but mostly jeeps, and we were all over the place in those days because nobody knew where anybody else was and there were pockets of Germans, some of them hostile and so
me of them just looking to give themselves up. There was no telling what you were going to run into until you moved in and they opened fire. Then you could run and maybe call back on the radio for help if you were lucky, which was our job. I’m not complaining, since I guess that it is the only way it could be done. As you probably know, the Major was attached to G2 at Corps and a man couldn’t ask for a safer or more comfortable job than that in the ordinary run of things, but the Major was not like the usual officers you find at Corps, though I am sure they have their jobs to do back there and they do them to the best of their ability. But he was always poking around where there might be trouble, seeing for himself, and his jeep became a very familiar sight to us and he engaged personally with us in quite a few little actions of one kind and another and I am happy to say that as old as he was, he was as brave and as fearless as the day is long and cheerful and democratic. If he had a fault, it was that he exposed himself sometimes when it wasn’t one hundred percent necessary. Well, on the day he was killed, we were at a couple of farmhouses about five miles from Ozières, and there was nothing doing there and we were taking a break. A Frenchman, a farmer, came up to us and he said he was from outside Ozières, and there was a bunch of Germans maybe 18 or 20 hiding there that wanted to give themselves up. So the Major took the Frenchman along with him and another jeep with four more guys and we took off. If you happen to be in France and see Ozières, you will see, coming in from the north, there is a crossroads 200 yards outside the town and when we got near there, the Major stopped the jeeps and he said we better go in on foot. He cut off a stick from a hedge and he had a white towel in the jeep and he tied it onto the stick and he said to the Frenchman in French You come with me and he said to me Sergeant you better come along too and he told the other boys to turn the jeeps around in case there was any trouble and to spread out a little and to try to cover us if anything went wrong. The town was all buttoned up. They got shutters on the windows in France and they were all closed and there wasn’t anybody moving anywhere and it was so quiet and peaceful you would think you were back in Iowa. The Frenchman and the Major and myself started walking up the road, with the Major in the middle and there was no sign that anything was going to happen and the Frenchman was talking in French to the Major and the Major was answering him, he said he was in France a long time ago, before the war, and that is how he picked up the language, when all of a sudden, just as we got to the crossroads, without any warning, the machine gun opened up. As I said above, I was hit in the shoulder and neck, but I managed to roll over into the ditch alongside the road just the same and the Frenchman did the same on the other side. In case you think the Frenchman was not one hundred percent on the level, let me tell you it came as much as a surprise to him as to me, and I could hear him crying and swearing in French in the other ditch all the time we were laying there. The Major was out in the middle of the road and I looked up out of the ditch at him after awhile and I saw that there was nothing to be done for him. After the one burst, the Germans shut up and they were never heard from again. Anybody tells you the Germans play according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, you refer them to me, and I will show them the two holes in my shoulder and neck. Although you never can tell, they might really of wanted to give themselves up and then maybe some crazy officer showed up in town and gave them a pep talk. Anyway, the boys back at the jeeps fired a few rounds over our head at the town to show the Germans there would be trouble if they tried to come for us and one of them took one of the jeeps back to the farmhouses for the Lieutenant and he showed up in record time and he came and got us, right out in the open, without paying any attention to whether the Germans might open fire again at any moment. I heard the Lieutenant say He never knew what hit him while he was looking at the Major, as I said above and that is something. They put a field dressing on me and they got me back fast and I could not ask for better treatment. In case you want to correspond with the Lieutenant, his name is Lieutenant Charles C. Draper and he was very close to your husband almost like Father and Son, except that I have heard a rumor back here in the hospital that the Lieutenant was ambushed in Luxembourg, but it is only a rumor.