When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  When it was time for Lucy to start school, Ginny started too, only she wasn’t supposed to. She would follow Lucy all the way there, and then stand outside the first floor where the kindergarten was and call for the child. At first the teacher changed Lucy’s desk in the hope that if Ginny didn’t see her she would grow tired, or bored, and go home. But Ginny’s voice only grew louder, and as a result Willard had to give her a special talking-to, saying that if she didn’t let Lucy alone he was going to have to lock a bad girl whose name was Virginia in her room for the whole day. But the punishment proved toothless, both in the threat and the execution: the moment they let her out of her room to go to the toilet, she was running in her funny ducklike way down the stairs and off to the school. And he couldn’t keep her locked up anyway. It wasn’t to tie her to a tree in the backyard that he had brought his sister home to live in his house. She was his closest living relative, he told Berta, when she suggested some long kind of leash as a possible solution; she was his baby sister to whom something terrible had happened when she was only a one-year-old child. But Lucy, he was reminded—as if he had to be—was Myra’s daughter and his grandchild, and how could she ever learn anything in school if Ginny was going to stand outside the classroom all day long, singing out in her flat foghorn of a voice, “Loo–cy … Loo–cy …”?

  Finally the day came which made no sense whatsoever. Because Ginny wouldn’t stop standing outside a grade-school classroom calling out a harmless name, Willard was driving her back to the state home in Beckstown. The night before, the principal had telephoned the house again, and for all his politeness, indicated that things had gone about as far as they could. It was Willard’s contention that it was probably only a matter of a few weeks more before Ginny got the idea, but the principal made it clear to Mr. Carroll, as he had a moment earlier to the little girl’s parents, that either Ginny had to be restrained once and for all, or Lucy would have to be kept away from the school, which of course would be in violation of state law.

  On the long drive to Beckstown, Willard tried over and over again to somehow make Ginny understand the situation, but no matter how he explained, no matter how many examples he used—look, there’s a cow, Ginny, and there’s another cow; and there’s a tree, and there’s another tree—he could not get her to see that Ginny was one person and Lucy was someone else. Around dinnertime they arrived. Taking her by the hand, he led her up the overgrown path to the long one-story wooden building where she was to spend the rest of her days. And why? Because she could not understand the most basic fact of human life, the fact that I am me and you are you.

  In the office the director welcomed Ginny back to the Beckstown Vocational School. An attendant piled a towel, a washrag and a blanket into her outstretched arms and steered her to the women’s wing. Following the attendant’s instructions, she unrolled the mattress and began to make the bed. “But this is what my father did!” thought Willard. “Sent her away!” … even as the director was saying to him, “That’s the way it is, Mr. Carroll. People thinking they can take ’em home, and then coming to bring ’em back. Don’t feel bad, sir, it’s just what happens.”

  Among her own kind Ginny lived without incident for three years more; then an epidemic of influenza swept through the home one winter, and before her brother could even be notified of her illness, she was dead.

  When Willard drove up to Iron City to tell his father the news, the old man listened, and received what he heard without so much as a sigh; not a single human thing to say; not a tear for this creature of his own flesh and blood, who had lived and died beyond the reaches of human society. To die alone, said Willard, without family, without friends, without a home … The old man only nodded, as though his heartsick son were reporting an everyday occurrence.

  Within the year the old man himself fell over dead with a brain hemorrhage. At the small funeral he arranged for his father up in Iron City, Willard found himself at the graveside suddenly and inexplicably stricken with that sense of things that can descend upon the tender-hearted, even at the death of an enemy—that surely the spirit had been deeper, and the life more tragic, than he had ever imagined.

  He brushed the snow off the shoulder of his jacket and stamped away a tingling that was beginning in his right foot. He looked at his watch. “Well, maybe the bus will be late. And if it’s not, he can wait. It won’t kill him.”

  He was remembering again: of all things, the Independence Day Fair held in Iron City—that Fourth of July almost sixty years back when he had won eight of the twelve track events and so set a record that stands till today. Willard knows this because he always manages to get hold of an Iron City paper every fifth of July just so as to take a look and see. He can still remember running home through the woods when that glorious day was over, rushing up the dirt road and into the cabin, dropping onto the table all the medals he had been awarded; he remembers how his father hefted each one in his hand, then led him back outside to where some of the neighbors were gathered, and told Willard’s mother to give them an “on your mark.” In the race that followed, some two hundred yards, the father outdistanced the son by a good twenty feet. “But I’ve been running all day,” thought Willard. “I ran the whole way home—”

  “Well, who’s the fastest?” one of the bystanders teased the boy as he started back to the cabin.

  Inside, his father said, “Next time don’t forget.”

  “I won’t,” said the child …

  Well, there was the story. And the moral? What exactly were his memories trying to tell him?

  Well, the moral, if there is one, came later, years later. He was sitting in the parlor one evening, across from his young son-in-law, who had stretched himself out with the paper and was about to munch down on an apple and so let the comfortable evening begin, when suddenly Willard couldn’t bear the sight of him. Four years of free room and board! Four years of floundering and getting on his feet again! And there he was, on his back, in Willard’s parlor, eating Willard’s food! Suddenly Willard wanted to pull the apple out of Whitey’s hand and tell him to pick up and get out. “The holiday is over! Scat! Go! Where, I don’t care!” Instead he decided that it was a good night to give his mementos a look-through.

  In the kitchen pantry he found a piece of soft cloth and Berta’s silver polish. Then from beneath the wool shirts in his bureau he removed the cigar box full of keepsakes. Settling onto the bed, he opened the box and sorted through. He pushed everything first to one side, then to the other; in the end he laid each item out on the bedspread: photos, newspaper clippings … The medals were gone.

  When he came back into the living room, Whitey had fallen off to sleep. The snow drifts, Willard saw, were floating up to obscure the glass; across the street the houses looked to be going down into the rising white waves. “But it can’t be,” thought Willard. “It just can’t. I am jumping to a rash conclusion. I am—”

  During his lunch hour the next day, he decided to take a walk down to the river and back, stopping on the way at Rankin’s pawnshop. Ha-haa-ing all the while, as though the whole affair had been a family prank, he recovered the medals.

  After dinner that night he invited Whitey to come with him for a brisk walk downtown. What he said to the young fellow, once they were out of sight of the house, was that it was absolutely and positively beyond his understanding how a man could take the belongings of another man, go into a person’s private belongings and just take something, particularly something of sentimental value; nevertheless, if he could receive from Whitey certain assurances about the future, he would be willing to chalk up this unfortunate incident to a combination of hard times and immature judgment. Pretty damn immature judgment too. But then, no one deserved to be discarded from the human race on the basis of one stupid act—a stupid act you might expect of a ten-year-old, by the way, and not a fellow who was twenty-eight, going to be twenty-nine. However, the medals were back where they belonged, and if he were given an ironclad promise that nothing like this w
ould ever happen again, and furthermore, if Whitey promised to cut out immediately this new business of whiskey drinking, then he would consider the matter closed. Here he was, after all, a fellow who for three years running had been third baseman on the Selkirk High School baseball team; a young man with the build of a prizefighter, good-looking too—Willard said all this right out—and what was his intention, to wreck the healthy body the good Lord had blessed him with? Respect for his body alone ought to make him stop; but if that didn’t work, then there was respect for his family, and for his own human soul, damn it. It was up to Whitey entirely: all he had to do was turn over a new leaf, and as far as Willard was concerned, the incident, stupid, mean and silly as it was, beyond human comprehension as it was, would be completely forgotten. Otherwise, there were no two ways about it, something drastic was going to have to be done.

  So overcome was he with shame and gratitude that first all the young man could do was take hold of Willard’s hand and pump it up and down, all the while with tears glistening in his eyes. Then he set out to explain. It had happened in the fall, when the circus had come to the armory down in Fort Kean. Right off Lucy had started talking a mile a minute about the elephants and the clowns, but when Whitey looked in his pocket he found only pennies, and not too many of them either. So he thought if he borrowed the medals, and then returned them a few weeks later … But here Willard remembered just who it was that had taken Lucy down to the circus, and Myra and Whitey and Berta too. None other than himself. When he pointed out this fact, Whitey said yes, yes, he was coming to that; he was, he admitted, saving the most shameful for the last. “I suppose I am just a coward, Willard, but it’s just hard to say the worst first.” “Say it anyway, boy. Make a clean breast of the whole thing.”

  Well, confessed Whitey, as they turned off Broadway and started back home, after having borrowed the medals he was so appalled and shocked with himself that instead of using the money as he had intended, he had gone straight over to Earl’s Dugout and made himself numb on whiskey, hoping thereby to obliterate the memory of the stupid, vicious thing he had just done. He knew he was confessing to terrible selfishness, followed by plain idiocy, but that was exactly how it had happened; and to tell the truth, it was all as mysterious to him as it was to anyone else. It had been the last week of September, just after old man Tucker had had to lay off half the shop … No, no—removing a calendar from his wallet, studying it under the front-porch light as they both stood stamping the snow off their boots—as a matter of fact it was the first week of October, he told Willard, who earlier in the day had had the date fixed for him by the clerk at Rankin’s as just two weeks back.

  But by this time they were already inside the door. Knitting by the fire was Berta; sitting on the couch, holding Lucy in her lap, was Myra—reading to the child from her poem book before sending her off to sleep. No sooner did Lucy see her Daddy than she slid from her mother’s lap and came running to drag him off to the dining room, to play their nightly “yump” game. It had been going on for a year, ever since Whitey’s old father had seen the tiny child go leaping from the dining-room window seat down to the rug. “Hey,” the big farmer had called out to the others, “Lucy yumped!” That was how he pronounced it, for all that he had been a citizen of this country for forty years. After the old man’s death it became Whitey’s task to stand admiringly before his daughter, and after each leap, sing out those words she just adored to hear. “Hey, Lucy yumped! Yump again, Lucy-Goosie. Two more yumps and off to bed.” “No! Three!” “Three yumps and off to bed!” “No, four!” “Come on, yump, yump, and stop complaining, you little yumping goose! Hey, Lucy is about to yump—Lucy is ready to yump—ladies and gentlemen, Lucy has just yumped once again!”

  So what could he do? In the face of that scene, what on earth could he possibly do? If after the long deliberation of that afternoon he had decided to consider Whitey’s theft forgivable, was he now going to bother to catch his son-in-law in a petty face-saving lie? Only why, why if Whitey felt so depraved after taking the medals, why in hell didn’t he put them back? Wasn’t that just about the easiest thing for him to do? Now why hadn’t he thought to ask him that? Oh, but he was so busy trying to be rough and tough and talking no-nonsense and letting there be no two ways about it, and so on, that the question hadn’t even passed through his mind. Hey, you, why didn’t you put my medals back if you felt so awful about it?

  But by this time Whitey was carrying Lucy up the stairs on his shoulders—“Yump, two, three, four”—and he himself was smiling at Myra, saying yes, yes, the men had had a good bracing walk.

  Myra. Myra. Without a doubt she had been the most adorable child a parent could dream of having. Mention a thing girls do, and Myra was doing it while the other little girls were still taking from the bottle. Always she was practicing something feminine: crocheting, music, poetry … Once at a school program she recited a patriotic poem she had written all by herself, and when it was finished some of the men in the audience had stood up and applauded. And so beautifully behaved was she that when the ladies came to the house for a meeting of the Eastern Star—back when they were still a family of three and Berta had the time to be active—they used to say it was perfectly all right with them if little Myra sat in a chair and watched.

  Oh, Myra! A pure delight to behold—always tall and slender, with her soft brown hair, and her skin like silk, and with Willard’s gray eyes, which on her were really something; sometimes he imagined that his sister Ginny might have been much like Myra in appearance—fragile, soft-spoken, shy, with the bearing of a princess—if only it hadn’t been for the scarlet fever. Back when she was a child the very frailty of his daughter’s bones could bring Willard almost to tears with awe, especially in the evening when he sat looking over the top of his paper at her as she practiced her piano lesson. There were times when it seemed to him as though nothing in the world could so make a man want to do good in life as the sight of a daughter’s thin little wrists and ankles.

  Earl’s Dugout of Buddies. If only they had knocked that place down years and years ago! If only it had never even been … At Willard’s request they had agreed to stop letting Whitey drink himself into a stupor at the Elks, and at Stanley’s Tavern too (now under new management—the thought occurred to him as the streetlights went on down in town), but for every human or even semi-human bartender, check of a husband and a father and cash it for him. And the another (named Earl) was actually amused to take the pay ironic part was that in that whole so-called Dugout of Buddies there was probably never a man who was one-tenth the worker, or the husband, or the father that Whitey was—that is, when things weren’t overwhelming him. Unfortunately, however, circumstances seemed always to conspire against him at just those times, rarely more than a month at a stretch, when he was suffering through a bad siege of what you finally had to call by its rightful name—lack of character. Probably that Friday night he would at worst have weaved up the walk, thrown open the door, made some insane declaration, and dropped into bed with his clothes on—that and no more if circumstances, or fate, or whatever you wanted to call it, hadn’t arranged for his first vision upon entering the house to be his wife Myra, soaking those fragile little feet of hers in a pan of water. Then he must have seen Lucy bent over the dining table, and understood (as he could understand, down in that alcoholic fog, if he believed an insult was involved) that she had pushed back the lace luncheon cloth and was doing her homework downstairs so that her mother wouldn’t have to face the dragon alone when he returned.

  Willard and Berta had gone off to play their Friday rummy. Driving to the Erwins’ that night, he agreed that this time they were staying clear through to coffee and cake, like normal people, no matter what. If Willard wanted to go home early, said Berta, that was his business. She herself worked hard all week, and had few pleasures, and she simply would not cut short her night out because her son-in-law had come to prefer drinking whiskey in a musty bar at the end of the day to eating a home-cooked
dinner with his family. There was a solution to the problem, and Willard knew very well what it was. But she would tell him one thing—it wasn’t giving up the Friday night rummy game and the company of her old friends.

  But Myra soaking her feet … Something told him he shouldn’t go off leaving her that way. Not that she was suffering so from the pain, not as she did in later years with her migraines. It was just the picture that he didn’t like somehow. “You should sit down, Myra. I don’t see why you have to stand so much.” “I do sit, Daddy. Of course I sit.” “Then how come you’re having this feet trouble.” “It’s not trouble.” “It’s from giving them lessons all afternoon long, Myra, standing over that piano.” “Daddy, no one stands over a piano.” “Then where did this feet business come from …?” “Daddy, please.” What more could he do? He called into the dining room, “Good night, Lucy.” When she failed to respond, he walked over to where she sat writing in her notebook and touched her hair. “What’s got your tongue, young lady? No good night?” “Good night,” she mumbled, without bothering to look up.