Lucy Crown

by Irwin Shaw

  Tony had to introduce Elizabeth to Oliver, and she said, throatily, “Major Crown,” when she shook his hand. Then she introduced the Sergeant, who said, “Hi,” indicating that he was off duty. Oliver insisted upon buying them a round of drinks and said, “You’re a damn pretty girl,” in a fatherly way to Elizabeth, and, “I don’t mind admitting, Sergeant, that it’s the sergeants who keep this man’s army going,” to the Sergeant.

  The Sergeant did not react warmly to this. “I think it’s idiocy,” he said, “that keeps this man’s army going, Major.”

  Oliver laughed democratically and Elizabeth said, “He was an industrial chemist and he’s peeved that they put him in the Air Force.”

  “I hate airplanes,” the Sergeant said. He looked bleakly around the restaurant. “We’ll never get a table,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “I’ve been thinking about steak all day,” Elizabeth said.

  “Okay.” The Sergeant nodded gloomily. “If you’ve been thinking about steak all day.”

  Then the headwaiter came over and told Oliver that there was a table ready for him in the corner and Oliver invited the Sergeant and Elizabeth to join them, which made the Sergeant look unhappier than ever. But it turned out that the table was too small and it was impossible to squeeze four people around it. Oliver and Tony, carrying their drinks, left the couple at the bar, and Tony heard Elizabeth saying, “My God, Sidney, you are a pill.”

  Tony, as he sat down, was sorry they hadn’t joined his father and himself. He was not particularly interested in either Elizabeth or the Sergeant, although Elizabeth had her uses, but he didn’t want to be alone with his father for a whole evening. For so many years now he had sat through these random, uncomfortable dinners with Oliver, in hotel dining rooms in the country towns where Tony had gone to school, in roadside restaurants during vacations when Oliver had dutifully toured the national parks with him when he was a boy, here in the city when Oliver had had his leaves. Sometimes it was worse than others, especially when Oliver was drinking, but there wasn’t a single dinner that Tony remembered with pleasure. And Oliver was certainly drinking now. He insisted upon continuing through the meal with whisky. “I understand Churchill does it,” he said, when Tony suggested wine. “What’s good enough for Churchill is good enough for me.” And he’d looked at Tony proudly and fiercely, linked momentarily with greatness.

  There was something strange about Oliver’s drinking this night. He was not a drunkard, and even on the other occasions when he’d had one or two too many, it had seemed almost accidental. But tonight he went at his glass with purposeful intensity, as though there was something to be done before the evening was over that could only be achieved after a certain excessive intake of alcohol. Tony, who had returned to water, watched him warily, hoping to be able to get away before Oliver collapsed completely. Deuteronomy, he remembered, enjoined fathers not to show themselves naked before their sons, but that was before the invention of Bourbon.

  His father ate noisily, taking bites that were too large for him, eating fast.

  “Best steak in the city,” he said. “They smear it with olive oil. Italians. Don’t believe what you hear about the Italians. Damn good boys.” He spilled some salad on his uniform and brushed it off carelessly with his hand, leaving an oily stain. When he was a boy, when he still lived at home, Tony remembered, he had resented his father’s insistence on fastidiousness at the table.

  Oliver ate in silence for a while, nodding with approval over the steak, eating with compulsive rapidity, emptying half a glass of whisky at a time, mixing the food and drink in his mouth. He chewed strongly, his jaw making a small, regular clicking sound. Suddenly, he put his fork down. “Stop looking at me,” he said harshly. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll have anybody looking at me that way.”

  “I wasn’t looking at you,” Tony said, flustered.

  “Don’t kid me,” Oliver said. “You want to disapprove of me, do it some other time. Not tonight. Understand?”

  “Yes, Father,” Tony said.

  “The low, slavering beast,” Oliver said obscurely, “munching on his bloody bones.” He glowered at Tony for a moment, then put out his hand and touched him, gently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m feeling funny tonight. Don’t pay it any attention. The last night …” He stopped inconclusively. “Some time,” he said, “it might be a good idea if you wrote me a full report. ‘My Impressions of Father.’” He smiled. “‘Father Drunk, Sober and Mistaken.’ Something like that. Leaving out nothing. Might do us both a lot of good. Might get that strangled look off your face the next time you see me. Christ, you’re an unhappy-looking boy. Even if you had good eyes, the Army’d probably turn you down on grounds of morale. You’d infect a whole regiment with melancholy. What is it? What is it? Ah, don’t tell me. Who wants to know?” He looked around the room vaguely. “We should have gone to a musical comedy tonight. Leave the country singing and dancing. Only all the goddamn tickets’re sold out. You got anything to say?”

  “No,” Tony said, hoping the people at the next table weren’t listening.

  “Never anything to say,” Oliver said. “Made a big speech at the age of thirteen that astounded his listeners with its brilliance and maturity, then shut his mouth for the rest of his life. That girl is smiling at you with all two eyes …”

  “What?” Tony asked, confused.

  Oliver gestured obviously toward the door. “The Sergeant’s girl,” he said. “She’s on her way to the latrine and she’s signaling to you like a sailor on a mast.”

  Elizabeth was standing at the door and she was smiling and gesturing to Tony with her finger. The room was L-shaped and the Sergeant was seated around the bend of the L and couldn’t see her. He was slouched in his chair, morosely eating a breadstick.

  “Excuse me,” Tony said, glad of an excuse to get away from the table. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t hurry on my account,” Oliver said as Tony stood up. “We don’t sail until the wind changes.”

  Tony crossed the room to Elizabeth. She chuckled as he came up to her and pulled him out into a little vestibule. “Are you prepared to be wicked?” she said.

  “What about the Sergeant?” Tony asked.

  “The Sergeant has bedcheck at eleven,” Elizabeth said carelessly. “Can you get away from Papa?”

  “If it kills me,” Tony said grimly.

  Elizabeth chuckled again. “They’re a riot,” she said. “Fathers.”

  “A riot,” Tony agreed.

  “He’s pretty cute, though,” said Elizabeth. “In his soldier suit.”

  “That’s the word,” said Tony.

  “The Village?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be at the bar in Number One at eleven-fifteen,” she said. “We’ll celebrate.”

  “What’ll we celebrate?”

  “We’ll celebrate that we’re both civilians,” Elizabeth said. She smiled and pushed him back, out of the vestibule. “Go ahead back to Papa.”

  Tony went back to the table, feeling better. At least the whole evening wouldn’t be wasted.

  “What time’re you meeting her?” Oliver said as he sat down.

  “Tomorrow,” Tony said.

  “Don’t mislead the troops,” said Oliver. He smiled mirthlessly and stared at the door through which Elizabeth had disappeared. “How old is she? Twenty?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “They begin earlier and earlier, don’t they?” said Oliver. “Poor sod of a Sergeant.” Oliver looked over at the Sergeant, safely behind the bend of the wall, and chuckled, without pity. “Paying five bucks a steak and losing his girl at the toilet door to the pretty young man.” Oliver leaned back in his chair and studied his son gravely, while Tony kept his mind on eleven-fifteen that night. “It’s pretty easy for you, isn’t it?” Oliver said. “I’ll bet they heave themselves at you.”

  “Please, Father,” Tony said.

  “Don’t be ungrateful,�
�� Oliver said, though without heat. “Maybe the best thing in the world is to be handsome. You’re halfway up the hill to begin with. It’s unfair, but it’s not your fault, and you ought to make the most of it. I wasn’t a bad-looking young man, myself, but I didn’t have that thing. Women could constrain themselves in my presence. When you’re older, write me about it. I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like.”

  “You’re drunk,” Tony said.

  “Of course.” Oliver nodded agreeably. “Although it isn’t a polite thing to say to a father on his way to the wars. When I was a young man fathers were never drunk. That was before Prohibition, of course. A different world. Yes,” he said, “you’ve got what your mother has …”

  “Please, Father, cut it out,” Tony said. “Have some coffee.”

  “She was a beautiful woman,” Oliver said oratorically, using the past tense as though he were speaking of someone he had known fifty years before. “She couldn’t come into a room without having every head turn her way. She had a modest, apologetic way of walking into a room. It came about because she was frightened, she was trying to make as little impression as possible, but it had a funny result. Provocative. Frightened … That’s a funny thing to say about your mother, isn’t it?” He stared at Tony. “Isn’t it?” he asked, challengingly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Frightened. For many years. For long, long years …” Oliver was almost chanting now and by this time the people on both sides of their table were hushing and listening to him. “Long, long years. I used to make fun of her for it. I kept telling her how beautiful she was because I wanted to give her confidence in herself. I thought I had so much myself that I could spare some, without feeling it. Confidence … Nobody has to give you any. You have it, and I’m happy for your sake. You have it and you know how you got it?” He leaned forward belligerently. “Because you hate everybody. That’s pretty good,” he said, “that’s pretty lucky—at the age of twenty to be able to hate everybody. You’ll go a long way. If they don’t bomb New York.” He looked around him fiercely and the people at the other table, who had been listening, suddenly began to talk loudly among themselves. “Wouldn’t that be a laugh,” he said. “All these fat ones sitting here, saying, ‘I’ll have it rare,’ and all of a sudden hearing the whistle and looking up and seeing the ceiling fall in on them. God, I’d like to be here to see that.” He pushed his plate away from him. “Do you want some cheese?”

  “No.”

  “I do,” Oliver said. “I want every damn thing I can get.” He waved to the waiter, but he wouldn’t order coffee. He insisted upon another glass of whisky.

  “Father …” Tony protested. “Go easy.”

  Oliver gestured at him with good-humored impatience. “Quiet, quiet,” he said. “I’ve simplified my tastes. All that crap about cocktails before dinner, two kinds of wine, brandy later … We live in a state of emergency. Streamlining is the order of the day. Even the Army’s done it. The streamlined division. Triangular. Eliminated the brigade, just the way I’ve eliminated wines and liqueurs. Great step toward winning the war. Don’t look disapproving. There are two or three things I intend to tell you before disappearing, and that’s one of them. Don’t look disapproving. It’s … it’s platitudinous.” A look of satisfaction spread over his face because he had thought of the word. “You’re too smart for stuff like that. The attempt should be in the direction of originality. Love your father. Where could you find something more original than that in this day and age? You’d be the talk of the academic world. A new phenomenon in psychological studies. Biggest thing since Vienna. The Cordelia complex.” He chuckled, pleased with his wit.

  Tony sat there dully, looking at the tablecloth, wondering when the wild, unexpected monologue would end, yearning suddenly for all the old, stiff, silence-studded meetings of other years, when his father had always been so polite, awkwardly restrained, painfully searching for subjects to talk about with Tony in the two or three hours a month that they spent together.

  “My father, for example,” Oliver said expansively, “killed himself. That was the year you were born. He walked into the sea at Watch Hill and just went and drowned himself. That was a hell of a fashionable place to commit suicide in those days, except, of course, nobody mentioned the word suicide, what they said was he had a cramp. Maybe he caught me looking at him that morning and he said, ‘That does it—this is the day for it.’ We never found the body. Rolling somewhere to this day in the Gulf Stream, maybe. The insurance was respectable. It was a windy day and there was a big sea. My father was always very careful of appearances. It’s a family characteristic and I can see it’s come down to you. Have you any theories on why your grandfather drowned himself at Watch Hill in 1924?”

  Tony sighed. “Father, I have to get up early tomorrow and you’ve probably got a big day ahead of you … Why don’t we get through here and go home?”

  “Home,” Oliver said. “My home is Room 934 in the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue, but I’ll go there if you come with me.”

  “I’ll take you in a taxi,” Tony said, “and drop you.”

  “Oh, no.” Oliver put his finger slyly along his nose. “None of that. I’m not buying any of that. I have a lot of things to talk to you about, young man. I may be gone thirty years and we have to plan out the plan. Ulysses’ final instructions to Tele—Telemachus. Be good to your mother and keep a running count of the guests.” He grinned. “See—I’m just a simple soldier—but there are still relics of a former and more gracious life, before the Hotel Shelton.”

  Tony looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten already. He looked across at Elizabeth. She and the Sergeant were at their coffee already.

  “Don’t worry,” Oliver said. “She’ll wait. Come on.” He stood up. The chair teetered behind him, but he didn’t notice it, and finally, it settled back without falling. Elizabeth smiled at them as they went out, after Oliver paid the check, and Tony tried to make his face express his resolution to get down to the Number One Bar as close to eleven-fifteen as possible.

  When they stepped out of the elevator on the ninth floor, Tony opened the steel door, because Oliver couldn’t get the key into the lock, and put on the light in his father’s room. The room was a small one, littered with gear, a Valpack sprawled open on the floor, a greenish raincoat on the bed, a pile of laundered khaki shirts in a rumpled pile on the dresser, some newspapers on the desk, hastily flipped together by a maid.

  “Home,” Oliver said. “Make yourself comfortable.” Without taking off his cap or trenchcoat he went over to the dresser and opened a drawer and brought out a bottle of whisky. “This is an amazing hotel,” he said, holding the bottle up to see how much was left. “The maids don’t drink.”

  He went into the bathroom and Tony heard him humming Pore Jud is daid while he ran some water into a glass. Tony went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The room was on a court and on all sides blind windows looked back at him. The sky was an indeterminate black distance above him.

  Oliver came back cuddling his glass and poured some whisky in it. Then, still in his cap and coat, he sank into the one easy chair.

  He sat there, slumped deep in the chair, sunk in his rumpled trenchcoat, with his cap back on his head, holding his glass in his two hands, looking like an aging soldier just returned from a defeat, caught for a moment in an escapable posture of exhaustion and despair. “Ah, God,” he said. “Ah, God.”

  Outside the door, down the hotel corridor, the elevator shafts howled softly, ominous and jittery in the metropolitan night.

  “A son,” Oliver said, mumbling. “Why does a man have sons? Ordinarily, you don’t ask yourself a question like that. If you lead an ordinary life, if you sit down to dinner with him every night, if you crack him across the ears once in a while because he’s annoying you, you take it for granted. What the hell, everybody has sons. But if the whole thing is torn apart, ruptured, departed”—he drawled out the verbs of division and farewel
l with mournful pleasure—“that’s another story. Another story.” Oliver sipped at his drink, deep in the chair, mumbling. “You ask yourself—why did I do it? What was in it for me? You want to hear? You want to know what I decided?”

  Tony turned away from the window and moved soothingly over toward the chair and stood in front of his father. “Do you want me to help you get ready for bed?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to get ready for bed,” Oliver said. “I want to tell you about sons. Who knows—one day you might have some of your own and you might be curious on your own hook. You have a son to renew your optimism. You reach a certain age, say, twenty-five, thirty, it varies with your intelligence, and you begin to say, ‘Oh, Christ, this is for nothing.’ You begin to realize it’s just more of the same, only getting worse every day. If you’re religious, I suppose you say to yourself, ‘The goal is death. Hallelujah, I hear them tuning the golden harps, my soul is in training for glory.’ But if you’re not religious—if you say, ‘That’s more of the same, only it includes Sunday,’ what have you got? A bankbook, unpaid bills, the cooling of the blood, what have we got for dinner, who’s coming to dinner—Last week’s menu, last year’s guests. Take a train full of commuters on their way home at six o’clock any evening in the week and you’ll have enough boredom collected in one place to blow a large-sized town off the face of the map. Boredom. The beginning and end of pessimism. And that’s where a child comes in. A little boy doesn’t know anything about pessimism. You watch him and listen to him and he’s in a fury every minute he breathes. He’s in a fury of growing, feeling, learning. There’s something in him that tells him it’s worthwhile to get bigger, to learn to communicate, to learn to eat with a spoon, to learn to go to the toilet, to learn to read, fight, love … He’s on that big wave, pushing him ahead—anyway he thinks it’s ahead—and it never occurs to him to look back and ask, ‘Who’s pushing me? Where am I going?’ You look at your son and you see that there is something in the human race that automatically believes in the value of being alive. If you had a father who walked into the waves at Watch Hill, that can be a damned important consideration. When you were three years old I used to watch you sitting on the floor trying to learn how to put on your own shoes and socks, working hard, and I would roar with senseless laughter. And while I was sitting in your room, among the toys, laughing like a farmer at the circus, I was on the wave with you, I leached away some of the optimism for my own uses. I was grateful to you and I treasured you. Now …” Oliver sipped his drink and grinned cunningly at Tony over the rim of the glass. “Now I don’t treasure you at all. More of the same. A young man with a grudge who reminds me of myself when I was younger, who reminds me of a pretty woman I happened to marry, who reminds me we screwed up the whole works …”