Lucy Crown by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online

shabby rented furniture, and they mingled their fragrance with the constant fresh odor of the lake.
    On the porch, Lucy stopped. “I’d love a drink,” she said. She didn’t really want one, but it would delay Oliver’s departure for another ten minutes. She knew that Oliver understood this and that he usually was annoyed, or at best impatiently amused, at what he considered her rattled postponements of farewells, but she couldn’t bear to face up to the moment when the sound of the car would diminish down the driveway and she would be left alone.
    “All right,” Oliver said, after a tiny hesitation, putting down his bags. He, himself, made efficient departures, said good-bye once, meaning it, and promptly left. He stood staring out at the lake while Lucy went over to the table against the wall and poured some whisky from the bottle there and some ice water into two glasses.
    A hawk wheeled up from the lakeside trees and circled slowly, its wings unmoving, above the water, and from the camp on the other shore, came the faint call of the bugle again, the soldiers’ signals with their echo of gunfire and defeat and victory, calling the children to swimming period or a ball game. The hawk slipped calmly across the wind, waiting for the small, fatal events of the world below him, the movement of grass, the lift of a branch, to disclose the presence of his supper.
    “Oliver,” Lucy was saying, coming up to him with the two glasses in her hands.
    “Yes?”
    “How much are you paying that boy? The Bunner boy?”
    Oliver shook his head, dissolving the confused images raised in his mind by the bird and the bugle and the imminence of departure. “Thirty dollars a week,” he said, taking one of the glasses.
    “Isn’t that a lot?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can we afford it?” Lucy asked.
    “No,” Oliver said, irritated by her question. Lucy ordinarily was haphazard about money and in his eyes was given to outlandish bursts of extravagance, not from greed or a love of luxury, but because of an infirm conception of the value and difficulty of money. But when she was opposed to something he wished to do, as he knew she was opposed to the hiring of Bunner, she showed an argumentative housewifely parsimoniousness.
    “Do you really think we need him?” Lucy asked, standing at his side, watching the slow circling of the hawk over the water.
    “Yes,” Oliver said. He lifted his glass ceremoniously. “To the small boy with the telescope.”
    Lucy lifted her glass, almost absently, and took a small sip. “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why do we need him?”
    Oliver touched her arm gently. “To give you some time to enjoy yourself.”
    “I love being with Tony.”
    “I know,” Oliver said. “But I think, for these few weeks, to have a bright, lively young man around him, somebody who can be a little rough with him …”
    “You think I’m making him too soft,” Lucy said.
    “It’s not that. It’s just that …” Oliver tried to find the most moderate and innocent reasons for his argument. “Well, only children, especially ones who’ve had a serious illness and who’ve had to be around their mothers a lot … When they grow up you’re liable to find them in the ballet.”
    Lucy laughed. “Aren’t you silly?”
    “You know what I mean,” Oliver said, annoyed at himself because he felt he was sounding stuffy. “Don’t think it isn’t a problem. Read any work on psychoanalysis.”
    “I don’t have to read anything,” Lucy said, “to tell me how to bring up my son.”
    “Just common sense,” Oliver began.
    “I suppose you want to say I’m doing everything wrong,” Lucy said bitterly. “Say it and …”
    “Now, Lucy,” Oliver said soothingly, “I don’t want to say anything of the kind. It’s just that maybe I see a different set of problems than you do, that I see things that I want to prepare Tony for that you don’t recognize.”
    “Like what?” Lucy asked stubbornly.
    “We live in chaotic