Lucy Crown (33 page)

“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 farewell 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 …”

“Father,” Tony said painfully, “there’s no need for all this.”

“Sure,” Oliver said, mumbling into his glass. “Sure there’s a need. Last will and testament. On the way to the wars. The wars help, too. You can’t have a son, have a war. That’s another wave. No time to look back and say who’s pushing me, where am I going. An illusion of purpose, of accomplishment. Take a town. Don’t ask what town. Don’t ask who’s in it. Don’t ask what they’re going to do after you’ve passed through. Don’t ask if it had to be taken. Just hope the war lasts long enough and the supply of towns holds out and that you don’t come back …”

“You wouldn’t talk like that if you weren’t drunk,” Tony said.

“No? Maybe not.” Oliver chuckled. “That’s a good reason for being drunk. You don’t remember, because you were too young, but I used to have a high opinion of myself. I thought I was God’s own combination of intelligence, honor, industry and wit. Ask me anything in those days, and I’d come up with the answer, quick as the Pope or an electric brain. I was solid as the Republic and none of the wires was crossed and certainty was my middle name. I was certain about work and marriage and loyalty and the education of children and I didn’t care who knew it. I stared out at the world with a clear and lunatic eye. I was the product of a solid family and a suicide father. I had prosperity behind me and a good college and a proper tailor and lightning couldn’t crack me if it hit me between the eyes on the Fourth of July. And then, in fifteen minutes in a little stinking summer resort beside a lake, the whole thing collapsed. I made the wrong decision, of course. But maybe the only right decision was to take you and hang you by the heels and drown you in the lake, and of course my social position wouldn’t permit that. Abraham and Isaac would never go down in Vermont no matter what angels were on the premises. What happened, of course, was that I turned the knife on myself, although I’m sure you have a different opinion. What the hell,” he said belligerently. “How bad was it for you? You left home a little earlier than usual and you were lonely on a couple of holidays, that’s all.”

“Sure,” Tony said, bitter now and remembering the seven years. “That’s all.”

“As for me,” Oliver said, ignoring his son, “I merely turned up dead. Later on, when I looked back on it, knowing I was guilty, I said it was sensuality that did it. And maybe it was. Only after a little while there wasn’t any sensuality left. Of course, we pretended, because when you’re married there’s a certain obligation to politeness in that department, but by that time there were too many other things in the way, and finally we just about dropped the whole thing.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Why not? You’re twenty years old,” Oliver said. “I hear you have a rising career as a collegiate stud. I’m not raping any virgin ears. Know Thy Father and Thy Mother. If you can’t honor them, at least know them. It’s not the next best thing, but it’s a thing. The war has made me virile again. I had an affair with a waitress in the town of Columbus, North Carolina. I outlasted a warrant officer and two captains from the Adjutant-General’s office on the crucial week-end. It was a hot week-end and all the girls were going around without stockings. If I were a Catholic, I would seriously think of taking orders. You are my priest,” he said, “and my favorite confessional box is located on the ninth floor of the Hotel Shelton.”

“I’m going,” Tony said, moving toward the door. “Take care of yourself and let me know where I can write you and …”

“For absolution,” Oliver said. “Three slugs of Bourbon. Where’s the bottle?” He asked peevishly. “Where’s the goddamn bottle?” He felt around on the floor next to the chair and found the bottle and poured himself a third of a tumbler full of whisky. He put the bottle down again and, closing one eye, like a marksman, flipped the cork across the room into the wastebasket. “Two points,” he said, with satisfaction. “Did you know that I was an athlete in my youth? I could run all day and I was deft around first base, although the best first basemen are all left-handed. I also hit a long ball, although not often enough to make it finally worthwhile. I also had leanings toward being a military hero, because a great-uncle was killed in the Wilderness, but the First World War cured me of that. I spent all my six months in France in Bordeaux and the only time I heard a shot fired in anger was when an MP fired at two Senegalese who were breaking the window of a wineshop on the Place Gambetta. Don’t go yet,” he pleaded. “Some day a son of yours might ask you, ‘What are the great moments in the family history?’ and you’ll be sick at heart that you didn’t stay another five minutes and soak in the old traditions. On our shield are the three Great Words—Suicide, Failure and Adultery, and I challenge any red-blooded American family to do better.”

“You’re raving now,” Tony said, not moving from the door. “You’re not making any sense.”

“That’s a court-martial offense, Son,” Oliver said gravely, from his chair. “Charity begins at the Hotel Shelton.”

Tony opened the door.

“Don’t,” Oliver cried. He struggled out of the chair, rocking a little, carefully holding his glass. “I have something for you. Close the door. Just five more minutes.” His face worked painfully. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a hard day. Close the door. I won’t drink any more. See …” He put the glass shakily on the dresser. “The ultimate sacrifice. Come on, Tony,” he coaxed, his head lolling. “Close the door. Don’t leave me alone yet. I’m getting the hell out of the country tomorrow and you’ll be free of me for God knows how long. You can spare five more minutes. Please, Tony, I don’t want to be alone just yet.”

Reluctantly, Tony closed the door. He came back into the room and sat stiffly on the bed.

“That’s it,” Oliver said. “That’s the boy. The truth is I drank today for your sake. Don’t laugh. You know me—I’m not a drinking man. It’s just that there’re so many things I wanted to tell you—and I haven’t been able to communicate with you for so long … Those goddamn dinners …” He shook his head. “First of all, I want to apologize.”