by Irwin Shaw
She has come a long way, he thought, to give me pain.
The thing that troubled him most about his mother, he realized, had been the expression on her face just before she awoke, when they drove up and stopped in front of the restaurant. That soft, secret, reminiscent female smile. It made him remember the moment when he had looked through the slit in the blinds as a boy and had seen her in Jeff’s arms. Her head had been turned toward the window, her eyes closed, her lips parted slightly in the kind of smile he had never seen on anyone’s face before that, selfish, devouring, impervious to any other claims but the claims of her own pleasure, shocking in the power of its relished emotion and its egotism. That smile had haunted him, and it had become for him the sign and danger signal of the entire sex. Whenever he was with a woman he kept looking for that smile, or a hint or hidden indication of it, like a gambler watching for a marked card or a soldier searching for a mine. It had made him reticent and cold, an observer rather than a participant, and had prevented him from giving himself completely in any relationship. The women he had known had sensed this quality of watchful aloofness. None of them had understood exactly what it was or what was behind it but he had been accused, in varying tones of hysteria, of being suspicious, frozen, incapable of love. Looking back at his connection with the female sex, it now seemed to him like one long and bitter arraignment, in which the accusers changed from time to time, while the accusation, grave and damning and unanswerable, remained always the same.
None of the women whom he had once been intimate with remained his friends and he had grown accustomed to seeing a set and vengeful expression on their faces when they met him anywhere by accident. He had left America in 1947 because a girl whom he had loved, he thought, very much, had refused to marry him. “I love you,” the girl had said, “but I’m afraid of you. You’re not all present, at any time. Even when you’re kissing me, you seem to be making some sort of qualification about me. There’ve been times when I’ve caught you looking at me, and some of them have been damn queer times, too, when the look on your face has chilled my blood. I never can get over the feeling that you’re always on the verge of moving off. I can’t get hold of you, and I’m sure, in my bones, that one morning I’d wake up and you wouldn’t be there. You’re an escaper and it isn’t only from me or from women, either. I’ve watched you with men, too, and I’ve talked to them about you, and finally, everybody has the same damn feeling. There isn’t a man I know who can honestly say that you’re his friend …”
The girl’s name was Edith, and she had had long blond hair, and she had married a man who lived in Detroit and she had had two children and been divorced twice since then.
An escaper. He had denied it bitterly when Edith had charged him with it, but he had known it was true, just the same. He had escaped the love of his mother and the pity of his father; he had escaped the war and the desires of women and the affection of men. He had escaped the profession he had almost prepared himself for and the country in which he was born. His wife was sure he was preparing to escape her, and in a way she was right. With his studio in another part of the city, and his trips and his nights away from home, he was already half-departed. He had married her soon after Edith had broken off their engagement. He had married her mostly because she had been very young, gay, innocent, and insistent, and it had looked at the time as though the marriage would not impose heavy claims upon him. But then the boy had been born and the gayety and innocence had gone and only the insistence had seemed to remain and there were long periods when only the responsibility for his son kept a kind of surface and hurtful marriage in being.
At what birthday, he thought, do I escape my son?
He looked up across the bottle of cold wine that the waitress had set on the table and saw Lucy coming out of the restaurant, her hair in order, her scarf trailing from her hand. He noticed the two men watching her again above the red claws on their plates, interested, involuntarily and automatically pleased with the sight of the tall, handsome, well-dressed woman, freshly combed and washed, falsely youthful in the flattering summer light and shadow of the arbor, moving toward the table at the end of the garden at which a young man awaited her. Wreathed in lust, Tony thought sardonically, garlanded everlastingly with desire, my mother approaches.
He stood up and helped her with her chair and poured them both a glass of the wine. They made no toast as they took the first sips.
“Well, now, that’s better,” Lucy said, drinking thirstily, feeling the wine working at the dust of the road in her throat. She looked across at Tony and was conscious again of the grimace of amusement, the twist of irony and rejection on his lips that had disturbed her so profoundly in the living room of his apartment that morning. It froze her and made it impossible for her to speak naturally, and her plan of being easy and matronly and superficial, waiting for a sign of compassion or affection from him before making any demands on him, now seemed naive and hopeless to her.
She was uncomfortable and ate quickly, without speaking or noticing what was placed before her. Nervously she drank most of the bottle of wine herself, unaware that Tony was keeping her glass full, with the solicitous and humorous malice of a roué debauching a child.
The wine was cold and dry, and her thirst seemed unquenchable and she was grateful when Tony ordered another bottle. It was very light, and aside from making everything about her stand forth with pleasant clarity, she was sure it was having no effect on her.
By the time they were halfway through the second bottle, she seemed to be floating off at a little distance, viewing the scene coolly, seeing a mother and son, linked by their good looks, gravely polite with each other, sitting in a Norman garden, enjoying each other’s company, civilized and reticent, decently on their way, long after the guns had been silenced, to pay their respects to their dead. Only, if you blinked a little, and pushed back the wine, and looked a little more closely, there was something wrong with the scene. The fixed smile on the man’s face, which at a distance would pass for an expression of indulgence and filial attentiveness, dissolved upon inspection into mockery, opened a gulf, denied love, was a tortured grin from the darkness of an abyss.
“Intolerable,” she said, putting her glass down, staring at him.
“What’s that?” Tony asked, surprised.
“Tell me,” she said, “what’s your opinion of me?”
“Now, really,” he protested, “I haven’t had the time really to form one.”
“You’ve had the time,” she said, her tongue slippery and a little thick with the wine. “I can see it in your face. You have a good, big, interesting opinion, and I’m interested to hear it.”
“Well …” Tony leaned back in his chair, deciding to humor her. “I must say I’ve been admiring you all day.”
“Admiring me?” Lucy asked harshly. “Why?”
“For remaining so young and beautiful and lively,” he said, smiling at her. “It’s very clever of you.”
“Clever,” she repeated, knowing that he meant to hurt her with that “clever,” and knowing that he had succeeded.
“I can’t help wondering how you’ve managed it,” he said, his tone light.
“Your wife asked me the same question.”
“I must ask her what you told her,” he said.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” Lucy said. “You tell her. I’m sure you have a theory about it.”
“Perhaps I do,” he said. They were staring across the table at each other, hostile, ready to do harm.
“Tell me,” Lucy said. “Maybe the right answer will do me a lot of good in the next twenty years.”
“Well,” Tony began, thinking, She asked for it, she came here, she dug it all up again, she yearned to see the grave, let her hear it. “Well, I was thinking along rather old-fashioned lines, I’m afraid. The wicked thrive, I was thinking. Youth lingers for the hard of heart. Sin and flourish. Remain untouched and families can crumble around you, empires crash, and not a hair in your head
will turn gray.”
“Untouched.” Lucy shook her head dazedly. “So that’s what you’ve been thinking, all these years.”
“Only in the figurative sense, of course,” Tony said, smiling crookedly.
There was silence at the table for a moment, while they both were caught in the chilly echo of Tony’s gibe.
“You miscalculate on yourself, Tony,” Lucy said gently. “You think of yourself as a mean and unpleasant man and, naturally, you try to live up to that picture of yourself. I don’t believe you really are, though. I know what you were like as a boy and the boy couldn’t have vanished completely, no matter what’s happened. I know about miscalculation, Tony, because I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to repair the damage I did by being all wrong about myself. All wrong. All wrong … Accidents and errors,” she said, her voice loose and musical and a little thick from the wine. “Accidents and errors. If that nasty little girl hadn’t been at the lake that summer, if she hadn’t been bored on a gray afternoon and decided to take a walk through the woods—if the sun had come out and she’d gone swimming, or if you’d just arrived a half hour later—we wouldn’t be here like this today. If you hadn’t been sick and nearly died your father would never have thought he had to hire a young man to take care of you … If he hadn’t gone into a garage one morning and found out that I hadn’t paid a bill that I thought I’d paid, and if he hadn’t called me up to scold me about it and made me feel rebellious and small … Nothing would’ve happened. Nothing.” She shook her head, seeming to wonder at the complex and malicious windings of fate which had overthrown her life. “But it was a gray day and there was a nasty little girl and there was a young man and you didn’t arrive a half hour later. So something that might have been only a single, rather foolish, unnecessary excursion—the sort of thing that happens to millions of women, and finally fades away into a harmless secret that they look back at indulgently in their old age—turned into a disaster. A watershed. To divide my life and yours, and your father’s.”
“That’s too easy,” Tony said, hating his mother for remembering everything so clearly. “You’re letting yourself off too easy.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t think that. Never think that. Everybody’s responsible for his own accidents and I stand behind mine. Only nobody avoids accidents, of one kind or another. You mustn’t expect that you’re going to get off without them. It’s what you do with them, how you come out of them, how you repair the damage, that’s important. Well, I did the worst possible thing. I made my accident permanent. I made every mistake in the book. After fifteen years of marriage, I enjoyed a young man for a couple of weeks in the summertime, so I decided I was a sensual woman. Well, it turned out I wasn’t. I was afraid of your father and I lied to him and the lie was an ugly one and I was caught in it, and ashamed of it, so I decided that from then on we could only survive by candor. Well, we didn’t survive. You were the witness and you were hurt and you had hurt us, so I decided to make the hurt irreparable. Your testimony was too painful to listen to that year so I sent you away. And your absence testified against us, more and more damningly, every year …”
“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.