When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  As soon as he was shipped to the Aleutians—even before the first shock of the place had worn off—he had written Bev asking her to get the University of Minnesota to send him an application form. When it arrived, he began to spend a little time each evening filling it out, but shortly thereafter it became evident to him that letters from Bev herself had just stopped coming. Fortunately by this time he was more adjusted to the bleakness of his surroundings than he had been on that first terrible night, and so was able to admit to himself that it had been pretty stupid to think of choosing a university because a girl he once knew happened to be a student there. And absolutely idiotic is what it would have been if after being discharged he had gone ahead and showed up in Minneapolis, to find that this girl had picked up with somebody new, neglecting however to tell him anything about it.

  So the application remained only partially completed, though it was still somewhere among “his papers,” all of which he planned to go through as soon as he could have two or three uninterrupted days so as to do the job right.

  The cheerleader Roy was sort of interested in was named Mary Littlefield, though everybody called her “Monkey,” he soon discovered. She was small and had dark bangs, and for a short girl she had a terrific figure (which you really couldn’t say was the case with Beverly Collison, whom in his bitterness Roy had come to characterize, and not unjustly, as “flat as a board”). Monkey Littlefield was only a junior, which Roy figured was probably too young for him now; and if it turned out that she didn’t have a brain in her head, then it was just going to be curtains for little Monkey, even before the first date. What he was in the market for this time was somebody with a little maturity in her attitudes. But Monkey Littlefield did have this terrific figure, with these really terrifically developed muscles in her legs, and that she was a big-shot cheerleader didn’t faze him as it had with Ginger Donnelly two years before. What was a cheerleader, anyway, but a girl who was an extrovert? Moreover, Monkey lived up in The Grove, and so she knew who Roy was: Ellie Sowerby’s cousin and a good friend of Joe Whetstone’s. He imagined that she knew he was an ex-G.I. simply because of his clothes.

  When she and her cohorts started in practicing their cartwheels, Roy would lace his fingers together behind his neck, cross one ankle over the other, and just have to shake his head; “Oh, brother,” he would think, “they ought to know what it’s like up in the Aleutians.”

  By then it would be nearly dark. The team would begin drifting off the field, their silver helmets swinging at their sides as they headed for the locker room. The cheerleaders would pick up their coats and schoolbooks from where they lay in piles on the first row of bleachers, and Roy would raise himself up to his full six feet three inches, stretch his arms way out and yawn so that anybody watching would just think of him as being more or less easygoing and unruffled. Then, taking one long leap to the ground, he’d plunge his hands down into his pockets and start off toward home, maybe kicking high out with one foot, as though practicing his punt … and thinking that if he had a car of his own there would probably be nothing at all to saying to Monkey Littlefield, “I’m going up to my cousin’s, if you want a lift.”

  Buying a car was something he had begun to give a lot of thought to recently, and not as a luxury item either. His father might not like the idea now any more than he had in high school, but the money Roy had saved in the service was his own, and he could spend it just as he liked. The family car had to be asked for days in advance and had to be back in the garage at a specific time every night; only with a car of his own would he ever be truly independent. With a car of his own he might just give this Littlefield a run for her money—once he had made sure that she wasn’t just an extrovert and nothing else … And if she was? Should that stop him? Something about the muscles in her legs told Roy that Monkey Littlefield either had gone all the way already, or would, for an older guy who knew how to play his cards right.

  … Up in the Aleutians it seemed that almost every guy in the barracks had gotten some girl to go all the way, except Roy. Since it didn’t hurt anyone, and wasn’t so much a lie as an exaggeration, he had intimated that he himself had gone all the way pretty regularly with this girl from the University of Minnesota. One night after lights out, Lingelbach, who really had the gift of gab, was saying that the trouble with most girls in the U.S.A. was that they thought sex was something obscene, when it was probably the most beautiful experience, physical or spiritual, that a person could ever have. And because it was dark, and he was lonely—and angry too—Roy had said yeah, that was why he had finally dumped this girl from the University of Minnesota, she thought sex was something to be ashamed of.

  “And you know something,” came a southern voice from the end of the barracks, “in later life those are the ones wind up being the worst whores.”

  Then Cuzka, from Los Angeles, whom Roy couldn’t stand, began to shoot his fat mouth off. To hear him talk, he knew every sex secret there ever was. All you have to do to make a girl spread her chops, said Cuzka, is to tell her you love her. You just keep saying it over and over and finally (“I don’t care who they are, I don’t care if they’re Maria Montez”) they can’t resist. Tell them you love them and tell them to trust you. How do you think Errol Flynn does it? asked Cuzka, who acted most of the time as though he had a direct pipeline to Hollywood. Just keep saying, “Trust me, baby, trust me,” and meanwhile start unzipping the old fly. Then Cuzka began to tell how his brother, a mechanic in San Diego, had once banged this fifty-year-old whore with no teeth, and soon Roy felt pretty lousy about saying what he had out loud. Skinny and scared as Bev had been, she was really a good kid. How could she help it if her parents were strict? The next day he was able partially to console himself over his betrayal by remembering that he hadn’t actually mentioned her name.

  Lloyd Bassart had come to the conclusion that Roy ought to apprentice himself to a printer over in Winnisaw. His father liked to say the word “apprentice” just about as much as Roy hated to hear him say it. The knowledge of this aversion in his son didn’t stop him, however: Roy ought to apprentice himself to a printer over in Winnisaw; he knew his way around a print shop, and it was an honorable trade in which a man could make a decent living. He was sure that the Bigelow brothers could find a place for Roy—and not because he was Lloyd Bassart’s boy but because of the skills the young man actually possessed. Artists starve, as anyone knows, unless they happen to be Rembrandt, which he didn’t think Roy was. As for enrolling in college, given Roy’s grades in high school, his father could not imagine him suddenly distinguishing himself at an institution of higher learning by his scholarly or intellectual abilities. Though Alice Bassart pointed out that stranger things had happened, her husband did not seem to believe they would in this instance.

  Lloyd Bassart was the printing teacher at the high school-not to mention the right arm of the principal, Donald “Bud” Brunn, the one-time all-American end from the University of Wisconsin. When the new consolidated high school had been built in Liberty Center in 1930, people still had a picture in their minds of Don Brunn making those sensational end-zone catches over his shoulder during his four years in the Big Ten. What catching a football over your shoulder had to do with organizing a curriculum or estimating a budget was something that would remain incomprehensible to Alice Bassart until the day she died, but nevertheless, on the basis of that skill, Don, who had been teaching civics and coaching athletics down in a high school in Fort Kean, was offered the position in his old hometown. Being no fool, at least where his own interests were involved, he accepted. And so for eighteen years—eighteen solid years of midstream, as Alice expressed it whenever her anger caused her to become slightly incoherent—Don had been the principal (at least he sat in the principal’s office) and Lloyd had been what Alice Bassart called “the unofficial unsung hero.” Don wouldn’t so much as hire a new janitor without letting Lloyd take a look at him first, and yet Don got the salary of a principal, and was some kind of household go
d to parents in the community, while Lloyd, as far as the general public was concerned, was nobody.

  When Alice got off on this subject, Lloyd often found it necessary to quote what he said were the words of a man far wiser than either of them, the poet Bobbie Burns:

  “My worthy friend, ne’er grudge an’ carp,

  Tho’ Fortune use you hard an’ sharp.”

  He agreed that Don was a grinning nincompoop, but that was one of the facts of life he had learned to accept long ago. After this much time you certainly couldn’t go around all day hoping and praying that the fellow might see the light and resign; if he could see that much light there might not be any cause for him to resign. Nor could you wait for him to slip on a banana peel; for one thing, Don was a healthy ox, destined to outlive them all, and for another, such an idea was beneath Alice even to think, let alone to say aloud. Either you could make your way through life with the bitter taste of envy always in your mouth, or you could remember that there are people in this world far worse off than yourself, and be thankful that you are who you are, and have what you have, and so on.

  Could Roy help it if he felt more like spending his evenings at Uncle Julian’s than at home? Not that he considered Julian perfect by any means, but at least his uncle believed in having something of a good time in life, and all his ideas weren’t about two centuries old. “Wake up!” Roy wanted to shout into his father’s ear. “It’s 1948!” But that Julian knew what year it was you could see right off, even in something like his clothes. Whereas the big magazine in Roy’s house was Hygeia, Julian took Esquire every month, and followed their clothing tips from top to toe. He was maybe a little too loud with his color combinations, at least for Roy’s taste, but you had to admit he was right in the current style, whatever it happened to be. Even his opinion of Mr. Harry S Truman (“half asshole and half Red”) didn’t keep him from having a collection of Harry Truman sport shirts that could knock your eye out … At any rate, to appear in a public place without a tie wasn’t something Julian considered a scandal, nor did he act as though life on this planet was coming to an end if Roy showed up at the house with his shirttail accidentally hanging out. That Roy wasn’t going to get all worked up over things that were only “externals” was something Uncle Julian seemed capable of understanding. “Well,” he’d say, opening the door to his nephew in the evenings, “look who’s here, Irene—Joe Slob.” But smiling; not like Roy’s father, whom all through the Army his son had remembered most vividly as he used to see him coming out of Mr. Brunn’s office—gray hair combed slick, mouth shut, tall and straight as an arrow—and wearing that damn gray denim apron, like the town cobbler.

  After he had come home from World War II, Julian had sat down to figure out what people needed that would be cheap and helpful to them and profitable to himself: he had come up with the idea of the laundromat. So simple, and yet within a year the quarters and half dollars that the ladies in the towns along the river dropped into the washers and driers of the El-ene Laundromatic Company left Julian twenty thousand dollars to himself.

  Now, Roy had no particular desire to follow in the footsteps of a businessman; it was not only personal considerations that caused him to hesitate before Julian’s offer to teach him the business; there was a matter of principle involved. Roy didn’t know if he still believed the way he used to in free enterprise, at least as practiced in this country.

  During his last few months up in the Aleutians, Roy had listened from his sack when some of the college graduates in his barracks had their serious discussions at night about world affairs. He himself didn’t say much then and there, but often on the following day he would find occasion, while sitting around the motor-pool office where he was supply clerk, to talk over some of the things he had heard with Sergeant Hickey. To be sure, he didn’t swallow everything this Lingelbach said that was critical of America. Sergeant Hickey was perfectly right: anybody could make destructive criticisms, anybody could just go ahead and start knocking things left and right all day long; to Sergeant Hickey’s way of thinking, if you didn’t have something constructive to say, then maybe you shouldn’t say anything at all, especially if you happened to be wearing the uniform and eating the chow and drawing the pay check of the country you thought was so terrible and awful. Roy agreed that Sergeant Hickey was perfectly right: there were some guys in the world who would never be satisfied, even if you fed them all day long with a silver spoon, but still you had to give this guy from Boston (not Lingelbach, who was an outright loner and odd-ball, but Bellwood) a lot of credit for his arguments about the way they did things in Sweden. Roy agreed right down the line with Sergeant Hickey and his Uncle Julian about Communism, but as Bellwood said, Socialism was as different from Communism as day from night. And Sweden wasn’t even that socialistic.

  What had made Roy begin to wonder if after his discharge a person like himself might not be happy living in a place like Sweden was (1) they had a high standard of living, and it was a real democracy with the Four Freedoms; but (2) they weren’t money-mad, Bellwood said, the way people in America were (which wasn’t a criticism, it was a fact); and (3) they didn’t believe in war, which Roy didn’t believe in either.

  Actually, if he hadn’t just returned from sixteen months in the Aleutians, he might have gone off and gotten himself a job as a deckhand aboard a freighter bound for Sweden, and once there, found some kind of good, honest work, and not in Stockholm either, but in some fishing village such as he had seen photographs of in Holiday. He might even have settled down there and married a Swedish girl, and had Swedish children, and never have returned to the United States again. Wouldn’t that be something? To think, if that was what he wanted, he could pick up and do it, and without explaining himself to anyone … However, for the time being he’d really had his fill of the sun coming up at ten A.M. and going down practically at noon, and the rest of what should be day being night. Probably that’s what got to the Swedes themselves—because something did. Sergeant Hickey, who saw all the magazines before they were put in the day room, came into the office one morning and announced that in the new issue of Look it said that more people jump off of buildings in Sweden than in any out-and-out capitalistic country in the world. When Roy later brought this up with Bellwood, he didn’t really have much to say in Sweden’s defense, except to start quibbling over percentages. Apparently there was a heck of a lot of gloom over there that Bellwood hadn’t mentioned, and very frankly, for all Roy’s willingness to sympathize with their form of government so long as it was a democracy with free elections, by and large he would prefer at the end of a day’s work to spend his leisure time with people who knew how to relax and take it easy. Moderation in all things, that was his motto.

  Consequently, he found that he would just as soon spend his evenings at the Sowerbys’ as hang around at home, where he either had to keep the radio at a whisper because his father was upstairs writing some report for Mr. Brunn, or else his father was downstairs and they were discussing something called Roy’s Future as though it were a body he had found on the front lawn: now look here, Roy, what do you intend to do with it?

  As for Lloyd Bassart’s disapproval of Roy’s nightly social call over to the Sowerbys’ (and of his brother-in-law Julian as an influence and confidant), he disguised his real objections by saying that he didn’t feel Roy should make himself a permanent fixture in another family’s house simply because they had a television set. Roy said why should his father mind if the Sowerbys themselves didn’t? Uncle Julian was interested in what the postwar Army was like, and in what the younger generation was thinking, and so he liked to talk to Roy. What was so wrong with that?

  However, the “talks” between Julian and Roy consisted, as frequently as not, of Julian’s pulling Roy’s leg. Julian got a kick out of kidding Roy, and Roy got sort of a kick out of being kidded, since it really put them on a buddy relationship. Of course, sometimes Julian went too far with his kidding, particularly the night Roy had said he really didn
’t think he could ever be satisfied as a human being unless he was doing something creative. As it happened, he was only repeating something he had once heard Bellwood say, but it applied equally as well to him, even though he hadn’t thought it up personally. Uncle Julian, however, chose deliberately to miss the point, and said it sounded to him as though what Roy needed was a good piece. Roy had laughed it off and tried to act nonchalant, even though his Aunt Irene was in the dining room, where she could hear every word they said.