When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  Which was a perfect case of her meaning well, but not having the slightest idea that he was a grownup whom you couldn’t do things like that to any more. Nevertheless, there had been times up in Adak when he missed her, and even missed his father, and felt about them as he had in those years before they had started misunderstanding every word that came out of his mouth. He would forget about all the things they said he did wrong, and all the things he said they did wrong, and think that actually he was a pretty lucky guy to have behind him a family so concerned for his well-being. There was a guy in his barracks who had been brought up in Boys Town, Nebraska, and though Roy had a lot of respect for him, he always had to feel sorry for all that he had missed, not having a family of his own. His name was Kurtz, and even though he had the kind of bad skin Roy didn’t exactly like to have to look at at mealtime, he often found himself inviting him to come to visit in Liberty Center (after they all got sprung from this prison) and taste his Mom’s cooking. Kurtz said he sure wouldn’t mind. Nor would any of them have minded, for that matter: one of the big events in the barracks was the arrival of what came to be known as “Mother Bassart’s goodies.” When Roy wrote and told his mother that she was the second most popular pinup girl in the barracks, after Jane Russell, she began to send two boxes of cookies in each package, one for Roy to keep for himself, and another for the boys who were his friends.

  As for Miss Jane Russell, her latest film had been banned by a court order from the movie house in Winnisaw, a fact which Alice Bassart hoped Roy would take to heart. That Roy read to Sergeant Hickey, and they both got a good laugh out of it.

  In the months, then, after his discharge, Roy made it his business first to catch up on his sleep, and second to catch up on his food. Every morning about quarter to ten—well after his father had disappeared for the day—he would come down in khakis and a T-shirt to a breakfast of two kinds of juice, two eggs, four slices of bacon, four slices of toast, a mound of Bing cherry preserves, a mound of marmalade, and coffee—which, just to shock his mother, who never had seen him take anything at breakfast but milk, he called “hot joe” or “hot java.” Some mornings he downed a whole pot of hot joe, and he could see that actually she didn’t know whether to be scandalized by what he was drinking or thrilled by the amount. She liked to do her duty by him when it came to food, and since it didn’t cost him anything, he let her.

  “And you know what else I drink, Alice?” he’d say, smacking his gut with his palm as he rose from the table. It didn’t make the same noise as when Sergeant Hickey, who weighed two twenty-five, did it, but it was a good sound just the same.

  “Roy,” she’d say, “don’t be smart. Are you drinking whiskey?”

  “Oh, just a few snorts now and then, Alice.”

  “Roy—”

  Which was where—if he saw she was really taking it all in—he might come up, put his arms around her and say, “You’re a good kid, Alice, but don’t believe everything you hear.” And then he’d give her a big, loud kiss on the forehead, sure it would instantly brighten not only her mood, but the whole morning of housework and shopping. And he was right—it usually did. After all was said and done, he and Alice had a good relationship.

  Then a look at the paper from cover to cover; then back into the kitchen for a quick glass of milk. Standing beside the refrigerator, he would drink it down in two long gulps, then close his eyes while the steely sensation of the cold cut him right through the bridge of the nose; then from the breadbox a handful of Hydrox cookies, one of his oldest passions; then “I’m going, Mom!” over the noise of the vacuum cleaner …

  In his first months back he took long walks all over town, and almost always wound up by the high school. It was hard to believe that only two years before, he had been one of those kids whose heads he would see turned down over their books, suffering. But it was almost as hard to believe that he wasn’t one of them too. One morning, just for the heck of it, he walked all the way up to the main door, right there by the flagpole, and listened to the voice of his old math teacher “Criss” Cross, that sweetheart, droning through the open window of 104. Never again in Roy’s entire life—never—would he have to walk up to the board and stand there with the chalk in his hand while old “Criss” gave him a problem to do in front of the entire class. To his surprise, the revelation made him very sad. And he had hated algebra. He had barely passed. When he had come home with a D his father had practically hit the ceiling … Boy, the things you can miss, he thought, if you’re a little crazy in the head, and strolled on, down through the ravine and out to the river, where he sat in the sun by the landing, separating Hydrox cookies, eating first the bare half, then the half to which the filling had adhered, and thinking, “Twenty. Twenty years old. Twenty-year-old Roy Bassart.” He watched the flow of the river and thought that the water was like time itself. Somebody ought to write a poem about that, he thought, and then he thought, “Why not me?”

  The water is like time itself,

  Running … running …

  The water is like time itself,

  Flowing … flowing …

  Sometimes even before noon he was overtaken with hunger, and he would stop off downtown at Dale’s Dairy Bar for a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato, and a glass of milk. At the PX in Adak they wouldn’t make a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato sandwich. Don’t ask why, he once said to Uncle Julian. They just wouldn’t do it. They had the cheese and the bacon and the tomato and the bread, but they just wouldn’t put it all together on the grill, even if you told them how. You could talk yourself red in the face to the guy behind the counter, but he simply wouldn’t do it. Well, that’s the old chicken s—t Army, as he told Julian.

  Afternoons he would often drop by the public library, where his old steady, Bev Collison, used to work after school. With his drawing pad in his lap, he would look through magazines for scenes to copy out. He had lost interest in the human head, and decided that rather than drive himself crazy trying to get a mouth to look like something that opened and closed, he would specialize in landscapes. He looked through hundreds of Holiday magazines—without much inspiration—though he did get to read about a lot of places and national customs of which he was totally ignorant, so it wasn’t time wasted—except when he fell asleep because the library as usual was so damn stuffy, and you actually had to make a requisition to get them to open a window and let some air in the place. Just like the Army. The most simple-minded thing, and you had to go around all day getting somebody’s permission to do it. Oh, brother, was it good to be free. With a whole life ahead of him. A whole future, in which he could be and do anything he wanted.

  During the fall he would usually walk back out to the high school late in the afternoon to watch the football team practice, and stay on until it was practically dark, moving up and down the sidelines with the plays. Close in like that he could hear the rough canvasy slap! as the linemen came together—a sound he especially liked—and actually see those amazing granite legs of Tug Sigerson, which were said never to stop churning, even at the bottom of a pile-up. They would pull ten guys off him and there would be old Tug, still going for the extra inch, the inch that by the end of a game really could be the difference between victory and defeat. Or suddenly he would have to go scattering back with the little crowd of spectators, as one of the halfbacks came galloping straight at them, spraying chunks of dirt so high and so far that on his way home Roy sometimes found a little clump of the playing field in his hair. “Boy,” he’d think, breaking the earth in his fingers, “that kid was movin’.”

  The guy you especially wanted to watch up close, just for the beauty of it, was the big left end, Wild Bill Elliott. Wild Bill had spent three years faking the opposition out of their pants, and was the highest-scoring end at Liberty Center since the days of Bud Brunn himself. In about one second flat he would fake the defense right, left, then cut left, buttonhook, take a Bobby Rackstraw bullet right in the belly, then—with just a shoulder—fake right again, o
nly to turn and zoom straight down the center of the field—until Gardner Dorsey, the head coach, blew his whistle, and Bill came loping on back in that pigeon-toed way he had, tossing a long underhand spiral toward the line of scrimmage, and calling out, “Heads up, baby.” Whereupon one of the onlookers beside Roy would say, “Ol’ Bill would have gone all the way that time,” or Roy might even say it himself.

  From over on the baseball field he would hear the band being put through their paces for Saturday’s game. “Attention, please, band. Ba-and!” he could hear Mr. Valerio calling through his megaphone … and really, it is about as good a feeling as he can ever remember having, hearing the band start up with the alma mater—

  A vic-to-ry

  For Li-ber-ty,

  We’re going to win,

  A vic-to-ry

  —and seeing the first team (three consecutive years undefeated—twenty-four straight) rise up out of the huddle, clapping their hands, and the second team digging in, and Bobby Rackstraw, the spidery quarterback, up on his toes piping out the signals—“Hut one hut two”—and then, just as the ball is snapped, looking up to see a faint white moon in the deepening sky over the high school.

  For the hour of the day, for the time of his life, for this America where it is all peacefully and naturally happening, he feels an emotion at once so piercing and so buoyant it can only be described as love.

  One of the stars of the football team in the fall following Roy’s discharge from the Army was Joe “The Toe” Whetstone. He was a fleet-footed halfback (he’d done the hundred in 9.9) and the greatest place-kicker in the history of the high school—some said, the history of the state. Since the summer Joe had been dating Roy’s kid cousin Ellie, and on Saturday nights, while Julian and Roy were having a talk together, or a beer, Joe would come around to pick up Ellie and take her to what had become a weekly event for the Liberty Center Stallions, the victory party. He would sit with the two of them in the TV room while “The Princess Sowerby,” as Julian called her, decided what dress to wear. At first Roy didn’t have too much to say to Joe. He had never really traveled with the athletes in high school, or with any gang, if he could help it; you lost your identity in a gang, and Roy considered himself a little too much of an individualist for that. Not a loner, but an individualist, and there’s a big difference.

  But Joe Whetstone turned out to be nothing like Roy had imagined. You might have thought that with his reputation, and being so good-looking, he would turn out to be another one of those swell-headed wise guys (like Wild Bill Elliott, who was big for spitting through his teeth into the aisle at the movies in Winnisaw, or so Roy had heard). But Joe was respectful and polite to the Sowerbys—and to Roy too. It took a while, but slowly Roy began to understand that the reason Joe sat there in his coat, nodding his head at whatever Roy might say, and himself saying hardly anything at all, was not because he was looking down his nose at him, but because he was actually looking up. Joe might be the greatest high school place-kicker in the history of the state, but Roy had just come back from sixteen months in the Aleutian Islands, across the Bering Sea from Russia itself. And Joe knew it. One Saturday night when Ellie came bounding down the stairs, Joe jumped to his feet, and Roy realized that the famous Joe “The Toe,” with six different scholarship offers already in his hip pocket, was really nothing more than what Ellie was—a seventeen-year-old kid. And Roy was twenty, Roy was an ex-G.I….

  Very shortly Roy began to hear himself on Saturday nights saying things like “They sure gave you the rush act today, Joe,” or “How’s Bart’s ankle?” or “How bad’s the rib going to be on the Guardello kid?” Some nights now it was Ellie who had to do the waiting while the three men finished up discussing whether Dorsey ought to have converted Sigerson from a tackle in the first place; or whether Bobby (Rackstraw) was going to be too slight for college ball, bullet arm or no bullet arm; or whether Wild Bill ought to go to Michigan (which had the big name) or to Kansas State, where at least he could be sure he was going to be with a coach who liked to move the old ball in the air.

  Those afternoons Roy went over to watch football practice he would almost always end up moseying over to the wooden bleachers back of the goal post so as to watch head-on as Joe placed his fifty through the uprights.

  “How you doin’, Joe?”

  “Oh, hi, Roy.”

  “How’s the old toe?”

  “Oh, holding up, I guess.”

  “That a boy.”

  It was also down at this end of the field that the cheerleaders practiced. After Joe had finished up—“So long, Roy”; “See you, kiddo”—Roy would button his field jacket, turn up the collar, lean back on his elbows, stretch his legs down across three rows of wooden stands, and with a little smile on his face, hang around a few minutes more watching the cheerleaders go through their oh-so-imporant repertoire of tricks.

  “Give me an L—”

  “L,” Roy would say, in a soft mocking voice, not caring whether they heard or not.

  “Give me an I—

  Give me a B—”

  Throughout his four years of high school Roy had had a secret crush on Ginger Donnelly, who had become head cheerleader when they were juniors. Whenever he saw her in the halls he would begin to perspire along his upper lip, just as he did in class when suddenly he found himself called upon to answer a question he hadn’t even heard the teacher ask. And the fact was that he and Ginger had never exchanged a word, and probably never would. However, she was built, as the saying goes, like a brick s. house, a fact Roy couldn’t seem to ignore, not that he always tried. In bed at night he would begin to think about the way she had of leaning back from the waist to do the Liberty Center locomotive, and he would get an erection; at the games themselves, after a touchdown, Ginger would do cartwheels the length of the field, and everybody would be screaming and cheering, and Roy would be sitting there with an erection. And it was ridiculous, because she wasn’t that kind of girl at all. Nobody had ever even kissed her, supposedly, and besides, she was a Catholic, and Catholic girls wouldn’t even let you put your arm around them in the movies until you were married, or at least engaged. Or so went one story. Another was that all you had to do was tell them you were going to marry them, right after graduation, and they “spread,” as the saying goes, on the very first date.

  Even where Ginger was concerned there had been stories. Almost every guy in Liberty Center would tell you that you couldn’t get near her with a ten-foot pole, and a lot of the girls said she was actually thinking about becoming a nun. But then this fellow named Mufflin, who was about twenty-five and used to hang around the high school smoking with kids, said that his friends over in Winnisaw told him that at a party across the river one night, back in Ginger’s freshman year (before she’d gotten so snooty), she had practically taken on the whole Winnisaw football team. The reason nobody knew about it was because the truth was immediately suppressed by the Catholic priest, who threatened to have all those involved thrown in jail for rape if even one of them opened his mouth.

  It was a typical Mufflin story, and yet some guys actually believed it—though Roy wasn’t one.

  Roy’s usual taste in girls ran to the ones who were a little more serious and sedate about things—Bev Collison, for instance, who had more or less been his private property during senior year, and was now a junior in elementary ed at the University of Minnesota (where Roy thought he might decide to go at the last minute, if everything else fell through). Bev was one of the few girls around who didn’t live her life as though she were in a perpetual popularity contest; she would just as soon leave the showing off to the show-offs, and didn’t go in for giggling and whispering and wasting whole evenings on the phone. She’d had a straight?average, worked after school at the library, and still had time for extracurricular activities (Spanish Club, Citizenship Club, The Liberty Bell advertising manager) and a social life. She had her two feet on the ground (even his parents agreed—bravo!) and he had always respected her a lot. Act
ually, it was because of this respect that he had never tried to make her go all the way.

  Still, it was the hottest and heaviest he had ever gone at it with anyone. In the beginning they used to kiss standing up in her front hallway (for as long as an hour at a stretch, but all the time in their coats). Then one Saturday after a school dance Bev agreed to let him into the living room; she took off her own coat and hung it up, but refused to let Roy remove his, saying he had to go in two minutes because her parents’ bedroom was directly over the sofa, toward which Roy was to stop trying to push her. It was several weeks more before he was finally able to convince her that he ought really to be allowed out of his coat, if only as a health measure; and even then she didn’t consent, so much as give up the fight, after Roy had already sort of slipped it half onto the floor, necking with her all the while so she wouldn’t know. And then one night after a long bitter struggle, she suddenly began sobbing. Roy’s first thought was that he ought to get up and go home before Mr. Collison came down the stairs; but he patted her a lot on the back and said everything was all right, and that he was really sorry, he hadn’t actually meant it; and so Bev asked, sounding relieved, hadn’t he really? and though he didn’t know exactly what they were talking about, he said, “Of course not, never, no,” and so from then on, to his immense surprise, she was willing to let him put his hand wherever he wanted above the belt so long as it was outside her clothes. There followed a bad month during which Bev got so angry with him that they very nearly broke up; meanwhile Roy was pushing and pulling and pleading and apologizing, all to no avail—until one night, fighting him off, Bev (inadvertently, she tearfully contended later) sank a fingernail so deep into his wrist that she drew blood. Afterward she felt so rotten about it that she let him put his hand inside her blouse, though not inside her slip. It so excited Roy that Bev had to whisper, “Roy! My family—stop snorting like that!” Then one night in Bev’s dark living room they turned on the radio, very, very low, and of all things, on “Rendezvous Highlights” they were playing the music from the movie State Fair, which had recently been revived over in Winnisaw. It was their movie, and “It Might As Well Be Spring” was their song—Roy had gotten Bev to agree. In fact, Roy’s mother said that he looked a little like Dick Haymes, though, as Bev commented, least of all when he tried to sing like him. Nevertheless, in the middle of “It’s A Grand Night For Singing” Bev just fell backward on the sofa with her eyes closed and her arms behind her neck. He wondered for a moment if it was really what she wanted, decided it must be, decided it had to be, and so, taking the chance of his life, drove his hand down between her slip and her brassiere. Unfortunately, in the newness and excitement of what she was letting him do, he caught the buckle of his watchband on the ribbing of her best sweater. When Bev saw what had happened she was heartsick, and then scared, and so they had to stop everything while she worked to pick up the stitch with a bobby pin, before her mother saw it in the morning and wanted an explanation. Then on the Saturday before graduation it happened; in the pitch-black living room he got two fingers down onto her nipple. Bare. And the next thing he knew she was off visiting her married sister in Superior, and he was in the Army.