by Irwin Shaw
Oliver used the razor a little uncertainly, in small, tentative strokes. He had never shaved anyone else before and it was different from shaving yourself. As he worked, he remembered, sharply, the day that his own father had shaved him for the first time. It had been the summer when he was fourteen, in the big house at Watch Hill, facing the ocean, and his father had come up for the week-end and had squinted at him, puzzledly, for several hours, much as he himself had squinted at Tony during lunch. Only, at the end of it, his father had burst into laughter and had roughly mussed Oliver’s hair and had marched him up to the old, dark mahogany bathroom, shouting through the halls for the entire family to come and watch.
Oliver’s older brother wasn’t there that week-end, but his mother and his two sisters, aged twelve and ten, a little disturbed by the unaccustomed boisterousness of their father, had appeared at the doorway of the bathroom, where Oliver was standing, grinning uneasily and stripped to the waist, while Oliver’s father methodically stropped his ivory-handled, straight-edge razor.
As Oliver cautiously made narrow swathes in the shaving cream on Tony’s cheek, he remembered, with total clarity, the exact, flat, pleasing, rhythmic noise that the razor in his father’s hand had made against the leather strap that hung next to the marble basin in the bathroom on the seashore in 1912. He remembered, too, the dry smell of the shaving soap, the feel of the badger-hair brush, the mixed smell of his father’s bay rum and his mother’s lavender that always hung in a thin, mysterious perfume in the bathroom. He remembered the feel of the ocean salt on his bare shoulders from the morning swim, and his mother in a blue organdy dress and his sisters, barelegged and grave, at the door of the bathroom.
“Come in, come in,” his father had said. “Watch the initiation of a man, ladies.”
His mother and sisters had stood there in the doorway, while his father had worked up the lather on his face, but when his father had taken the razor and had flipped it three or four times on the palm of his hand, his mother had tapped the shoulders of her daughters and had said, “This is no place for us, girls. This is for the males of the tribe.” She had been smiling, but the smile had been a funny one, one that Oliver had never seen on his mother’s face before, and she had firmly led the girls out and closed the bathroom door before Oliver’s father had made the first stroke with the razor. Oliver’s father had watched silently, gravely, for several long moments after the door had closed. Then he had chuckled, and holding Oliver’s chin with one hand, he had shaved him, swiftly, accurately, with assurance. Oliver still remembered the feel of his father’s fingers on his jaw, firm, strong, gentle—and, he realized much later, after his father was dead, full of love and regret.
With his own hand on his son’s chin, conscious that his movements lacked the assurance of his father’s at that distant, similar ceremony, Oliver was obscurely oppressed by the recurrence of rites, with their different weight of love and gayety. Remembering, for the first time in many years, vanished summers, almost-forgotten children, unvisited rooms, his robust and sure-fingered dead father, Oliver had the feeling that when Tony, in his turn, looked back from the vantage point of maturity on this half-comic, half-solemn moment, in the bare, neat dormitory room, with its flaking skeleton and its map marked with the colored pins of escape, he would have reason to complain of his father.
None of this showed on his face, Oliver was sure, as he matter-of-factly scraped the thick white cream from Tony’s jaws and chin. He finished, taking the last bit of fuzz off the boy’s upper lip, and stepped back. “There we are,” he said. “Now wash your face.”
Tony bent over the basin, cupping water in his hands and splashing himself vigorously. Oliver looked at the bent, naked back, thin, but with a wiry shape of muscle that the ill-fitting jacket had belied. The skin, Oliver noted suddenly, was exactly the same color and texture as Lucy’s, soft, very smooth, very white, with a healthy, glowing flush of blood near the surface.
When Tony straightened up and dried his face, he looked, for the first time, into the mirror above the washbasin. Staring at himself, he touched, with one hand, the new smoothness of his cheeks. Oliver, standing behind him, met Tony’s eyes in the mirror. With the glasses off, they were exactly Lucy’s eyes, large, deep gray, shadowy, intelligent. Suddenly, examining his son’s scrubbed, lean, adolescent face in the mirror, Oliver realized that Tony was going to be a spectacularly handsome man.
Almost as if he had divined what was going on in his father’s mind, Tony grinned at Oliver in the mirror. “Boy,” he said, embarrassed and pleased with himself, “we’re going to kill them.”
Then they both chuckled. And then Oliver knew that it was going to be impossible to leave Tony to the Thanksgiving dinner of the Hollises, to the headmaster’s hearty, paid-up hospitality, and his regretful misgivings, to the mournful prophecies he would make to his buxom wife about the future he foresaw for young Crown, to the company of the deserted boys whose parents were in India or who came from broken homes and had failed to get invited for the holidays to homes that were not yet broken.
“Pack your bag, Tony,” Oliver said crisply. “I’m taking you home for the week-end.”
Tony remained motionless for a second, searching his father’s face in the mirror. Then, without smiling, he nodded, and put on his shirt, and unhurriedly and efficiently packed his bag.
On the drive toward New York, just as they neared the city limits, Tony asked, “How is Mother?”
“Fine,” Oliver said.
It was the first time they had mentioned Lucy between them in two years.
Lucy came to the Pennsylvania Hotel bar five minutes before six. Keeping an obscure and unvoiced bargain with herself, she was always on time now and never kept Oliver waiting when they went out together or had an appointment to meet each other. The bar was full of commuters catching a last drink or two before getting their trains to New Jersey or Long Island, and there was a sign that announced that unescorted ladies would not be served at the bar. She found a table in a corner and ordered a whisky. She sat modestly in her corner, waiting for her husband, looking from time to time without shyness at the men who crowded around the bar, not lowering her eyes when they glanced at her. They looked gray and worn by the day’s work, and they drank greedily, as though they needed the liquor to face the trip home and the evening ahead of them. Freshly bathed and dressed herself, prepared for holiday, she felt a touch of pity and contempt, observing them in their drab, office-staled clothes. She was looking forward to the dinner with Oliver in an Italian restaurant nearby that they both liked. And after that, the night on the train together. She had a childish love of trains and felt cosy and important sleeping in a compartment, listening to the sound of the wheels. And Oliver was a good traveler, attentive and much more talkative and light-hearted when he was away from home.
Then she saw Oliver coming toward her, moving among the crowded tables. She smiled and waved at him. He didn’t smile back. Instead, he halted for a moment, to allow someone who was walking behind him to come abreast of him. The two figures stood there, some thirty feet away, in the narrow aisle between the tables, cigarette smoke drifting lightly around their heads.
Lucy blinked, and shook her head. Impossible, she thought.
Then the two figures advanced toward her and, without realizing what she was doing, she stood up. What a place to see him, she thought. In a bar like this.
Oliver and Tony stopped across the table from her. They stood that way, confronting each other silently.
“Hello, Mother,” Tony said, and she heard that his voice had changed.
“Hello, Tony,” she said.
She looked from one face to the other. Tony seemed wary, but not uneasy or embarrassed. Oliver was regarding her closely, his expression somber, watchful, vaguely threatening.
Lucy sighed, gently. Then she moved out from behind the table and put her arms around Tony and kissed his cheek. He stood there, his hands at his sides, permitting himself to be kissed.
/> He looks awfully tall and old to be my son, Lucy thought, conscious of the commuters watching the family scene.
“We’re not going South,” Oliver said. “We’re all going home for the week-end.”
It was more than a statement, and she knew it. It was a demand, a question, an assertion of change, a warning.
Lucy hesitated only a moment. “Of course,” she said.
“You two stay here,” Oliver said. “I’ll go across the street and turn in the tickets. I’ll be right back.”
“No,” Lucy said, panicky at the idea of being left alone, so abruptly, with Tony. “It’s terribly noisy and smoky here. We’ll all go together.”
Oliver nodded. “Whatever you say.”
In the station she stood close to Oliver at the ticket window while he wrangled with the man behind the wicket. She kept talking, in a voice which sounded, even to her, high and unnatural and artificially animated. “Well, this changes everything, doesn’t it? We have a huge amount of planning to do. The first thing is to make sure we have something to eat in the house for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. You know what we’ll do … we’ll go down to those wonderful Italian shops on Eighth Avenue, because all the stores’ll be closed tomorrow at home, and we’ll buy a turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce and chestnuts for the dressing …”
“By God,” Oliver said to the man behind the window, “I’m giving you four hours’ notice. That’s enough for any railroad. When you buy a ticket you don’t make a contract for life, do you?”
The man grumbled and said he had to talk to the night manager and he left and could be seen talking, bent over, to a gray-haired man behind a desk, who occasionally glanced up bleakly at the window at which Oliver was standing.
Tony stood silently, listening to his mother, scanning the crowds moving through the station.
“And we’ll go into Schrafft’s,” Lucy went on, still in the high, nervous voice, “and get a pumpkin pie and a mince pie, and we’ll buy some bread for cold turkey sandwiches for tomorrow night. And do you know what I think we ought to do tonight, Oliver …” She paused, waiting for him to answer, but he was glowering at the clerk and the manager and he didn’t reply. “Tonight, let’s eat in Luigi’s, with Tony. Do you like Italian food, Tony?”
Tony turned slowly and looked at her, across the gap of the two years, across the gap in which knowledge of each other’s tastes and manners and idiosyncrasies had disappeared. “I like it all right,” he said, speaking a little more slowly than usual, as if he understood that his mother was going on at a rate and a pitch that was not normal for her and as if, by his own sobriety, he hoped to tone her down.
“Good!” Lucy said, with too much enthusiasm. “It’s your father’s and my favorite restaurant,” she said, offering it to him, offering him, in the same sentence, a picture of shared tastes, marital harmony, friendship. “And then, after that, Oliver, do you know what I think we ought to do with Tony?”
“It’s about time,” Oliver said to the clerk, who had just come back to his station and was unpleasantly counting out the money for the exchanged tickets.
“We ought to go see a show together,” Lucy said. “Do you like the theatre, Tony?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“Do you go often?”
“Once in a while.”
“Maybe we can get into a musical comedy,” Lucy said. “What do you think, Oliver?”
Oliver turned away from the ticket window, after a disapproving grunt of farewell for the clerk. “What’s that?” he asked.
“I was saying,” Lucy said, talking swiftly, as though by the continual froth of her conversation she could keep any of them from taking stock of themselves and each other, “that maybe we could take Tony to a musical comedy. Since it’s a holiday evening and we’re all here in town together and …”
“What about it, Tony?” Oliver asked. “You want to go to the theatre?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Tony. “But if it’s all the same to you, not to a musical comedy. There’s a play I heard about … Thunder Rock. I’d like to see that, if we can get tickets.”
“Thunder Rock,” Lucy said, making a little grimace. “I heard it’s terribly morbid.”
“There’s no sense in wasting time on a musical comedy,” Tony said firmly. “It’d be different if I lived in New York and got to the theatre all the time.”
“Oliver …” Lucy said doubtfully. She was afraid of the effect on them of a grim play, afraid of the moment when they came out of the theatre, wary and uncertain of each other, and disturbed by two hours of dark emotion. A musical comedy, inconsequential and pretty, would make things easier.
“It’s Tony’s party,” Oliver said, as they walked toward the steps leading out of the station. “The first thing we’ll do is go into the hotel and see if they can get us the tickets.”
Lucy fell silent, walking between her husband and her son. He’s beginning to make everybody’s decisions again, she thought resentfully.
She conducted the shopping tour through the crowded, holiday-eve markets with an extravagant and almost hysterical open-handedness, piling her purchases indiscriminately into Oliver’s or Tony’s arms, talking steadily, adding to the morrow’s menu, her eyes roving across the hanging rows of turkeys, the piled pyramids of oranges, apples, tangerines, grapefruit, the displays of South American melons and pineapples, the bins of potatoes and chestnuts. Then they were late and they dumped their purchases into the trunk of the car and hurried to the restaurant, where Lucy drank too much, without realizing what she was doing, and where they had to cut the meal short to get to the theatre on time. As she shopped, and rattled on, and nervously ate and drank, Lucy was conscious only of a need for postponement. Dazed by the sudden appearance of Tony, uncertain whether it was an ambush or a reinforcement to her happiness, too unstrung to be able to see what signals either Oliver or Tony were putting up, she fought confusedly to keep from making any decisions herself in those first hours or permitting the others to make any decisions on their own part.
In the theatre, she was drowsy and only listened intermittently to what the actors were saying on the stage. Between the acts she said she was too tired to go out, and sat numbly by herself when Oliver took Tony across the street for a Coca-Cola. And on the long trip home, she sat in the back of the car, not quite awake, not trying to hear what Tony and Oliver were saying to each other in the quiet darkness in front of her. When they got home, she nearly stumbled going up the front steps and said, quite truthfully, that she couldn’t keep her eyes open another minute. She kissed Tony good night, briskly and without emotion, as though the two years had not intervened, and left Oliver with the job of settling the boy down in the guest room.
It was a retreat and she knew it and she was sure that Oliver, at least, and probably Tony, too, understood it, but she was too tired to care. When she got into bed and turned out the light, she had a little weary flicker of triumph. I got through the whole evening, she thought, and nothing happened. Tomorrow I’ll be fresh and I’ll take hold.
As she drifted off to sleep she heard the voices of Oliver and Tony, low, friendly, intimate, on the other side of the bedroom door and the male tread of their footsteps going down the hallway to the guest room at the back of the house. They walk so heavily, she thought. Both of them.
She wondered whether Oliver would come into her room to sleep tonight. And if he did, for whom would he be doing it? Himself? Her? Tony?
She folded her arms across her breasts and held her shoulders, because she was shivering with cold.
She was asleep when Oliver came into the darkened room, and the careful sounds he made as he undressed and got into the bed didn’t awaken her.
Usually she awoke fairly early, but on this Thanksgiving morning, she slept till past ten o’clock, and when she woke she felt heavy and hangover-ish. She moved slowly as she washed and combed her hair, and she dressed with more care than she ordinarily took in the mornings. Whatever opinion h
e has of me, she thought grimly, at least he’s going to admit that his mother is not bad-looking.
She heard no sounds in the rest of the house and she took it for granted that Oliver and Tony were either in the living room or the breakfast room, off the kitchen, downstairs. But when she went down she saw that the house was empty, shining in the morning sunlight, with two sets of breakfast dishes neatly washed and left in the wire frame on one side of the kitchen sink to dry.
There was a note on the kitchen table in Oliver’s handwriting, and she hesitated before picking it up and reading it, disturbed by absurd fears that there would be news in it of departures, discoveries, denunciations. But when she picked it up and read it, all it said was that they’d had their breakfast and they hadn’t wanted to wake her and that since it was such a fine morning they were going to a high-school football game in town that was to start at eleven o’clock. They would be back, the note went on, in Oliver’s precise and authoritative handwriting, not much later than one-thirty and they would be ready for the turkey. Love, Oliver, it ended.
She was grateful for the respite and she bustled around the kitchen, cleaning the turkey, putting the cranberries up to cook, roasting and shelling the chestnuts, moving swiftly and automatically about her chores, glad that the maid had been given the week-end off and that she had to do the work herself and that she had the house all to herself to do it in. When, during the morning, flushed from her work and the heat of the oven, she thought of Tony, it was almost carelessly. It all seemed so normal—in how many homes throughout the country was the son of the house back from school for the holiday and out watching a football game with his father while the mother prepared the standard feast. And if Tony had not been wildly affectionate the evening before, that was to be expected. He hadn’t been antagonistic, either. His attitude, if it had been an attitude, could be described as neutral. A little warmer and better than neutral, Lucy corrected herself, basting the bird. She hummed comfortably to herself in the sunny kitchen. After all, two years is a long time, she thought, especially in the life of a boy. A lot of things are forgotten in two years—or at least blurred over and softened. She herself, she thought comfortably, setting the table, couldn’t remember clearly just what had happened two years ago and it had all flattened out and lost the power of damaging her. At this distance it was hard to remember just why everybody had made such a crisis out of it.
