When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  Julian’s sense of humor wasn’t always up Roy’s alley. It was one thing if you were in the barracks, or the motor-pool office, to say f. this and f. that, and another when there were women around. Where Uncle Julian’s language was concerned, Roy felt his father had his strongest case. And then sometimes Julian got his goat with his opinions on art, which were totally uninformed. It wasn’t the security angle he wanted Roy to think about before going off to some la-dee-da art school; it was the sissy angle. “Since when did you become a lollipop, Roy? Is that what you were doing up there in the North Pole, turning pansy on the taxpayers’ money?”

  But by and large the kidding was good-natured, and the arguments they had didn’t last very long. Though Uncle Julian was just a couple of inches over five feet, he had been an infantry officer during the war, and had nearly had his left ball shot off more times than he could count. And even though he said it just that way, regardless of the age or sex of anyone listening, you had to admire him, because it was the pure truth. The guy who had called out “Nuts!” to the enemy had gotten all the publicity at the time, but apparently Julian had been known throughout the 36th Division as “Up Yours” Sowerby; more than once that was the message he had shouted back to the Germans, when another man would have withdrawn or even surrendered. He had risen to the rank of major and been awarded a Silver Star; even Lloyd Bassart took his hat off to him on that score, and had invited him to address the student body of the high school when he returned from the war. Roy remembered it yet: Uncle Julian had used hell and damn twelve times in the first five minutes (according to a count kept by Lloyd Bassart), but fortunately thereafter simmered down, and when he was finished, the students had risen to their feet and sung “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along” in his honor.

  Julian called Roy “you long drink of water,” and “you big lug,” and “Slats,” and “Joe Slob,” and hardly ever just Roy. Sometimes his nephew had no sooner stepped into the foyer than Julian had his fists up and was dancing back into the living room, saying, “Come on, come on, Slugger—try and land one.” Roy, who had learned in gym class how to throw a one-two punch (though he had not yet had occasion to use it in the outside world), would come after Julian, open-handed, leading with his right, while Uncle Julian would bob and weave, cuffing aside the one before Roy could deliver the two. Roy would circle and circle, looking in vain for his opening, and then—it never failed to happen—Julian would cock back his right arm, cry “Ya!” and even as Roy was ducking his chin behind his fists and hiding his belly back of his elbows (just as he had been taught in high school), Julian would already be swinging one leg around sideways to give his nephew a quick soft boot in the behind with the toe of his bedroom slipper. “Okay, Slim,” he’d say, “sit down, take a load off your mind.”

  But the best thing about Julian wasn’t his happy-go-lucky manner: it was that his experience in the Army made him appreciate how hard it was for an ex-G.I. to adjust back to civilian life at the drop of a hat. Roy’s father had been too young for World War I and too old for World War II, and so the whole business of being a veteran was just one more aspect of modern life that he couldn’t get into his head. That a person’s values might have changed after two years of military service didn’t seem to mean anything to him. That a person might actually benefit from a breather in which he got a chance to talk over some of what he had learned, to digest it, didn’t strike him as anything but a waste of precious time. He really made Roy’s blood boil.

  Julian, on the other hand, was willing to listen. Oh, he made plenty of suggestions too, but there was a little difference between somebody making a suggestion and somebody giving you an order. So all through that fall and into the winter, Julian listened, and then one evening in March, while he and Roy were smoking cigars and watching the Milton Berle Show, Roy suddenly began during the commercial to say that he was starting to think that maybe his father was right, that all this valuable time was just slipping through his fingers, like water itself.

  “For crying out loud,” Julian said, “what are you, a hundred?”

  “But that isn’t the point, Uncle Julian.”

  “Come on, get off your own back, will you?”

  “But my life—”

  “Life? You’re twenty years old. You’re a twenty-year-old kid. Twenty, Long John—and it won’t last forever. For Christ’s sake, live it up a little, have a good time, get off your own back. I can’t stand hearing it any more.”

  And so the next day Roy finally did it; he hitched over to Winnisaw and bought a two-tone, second-hand 1946 Hudson.

  2

  From between the curtains in her bedroom, Ellie Sowerby and her friend Lucy watched him begin to take it apart and put it together again. Every once in a while he would stop and sit up on the fender, with his knees to his chest, swinging a Coke bottle back and forth in front of his eyes. “The war hero is thinking about his future,” Eleanor would say, and the very idea caused her to snort out loud. Roy, however, appeared to pay no attention to either of them, even when Eleanor rapped on the window and ducked away. As the weather grew warmer, he would sometimes be seen slouched down in the back of the Hudson, his legs thrown up over the front seat, reading a book he had taken out of the library. Ellie would call out the window, “Roy, where in Sweden are you going to live?” To which his answer would generally be a loud slam of the rear door of the car. “Roy’s reading all about Sweden. Half the farmers around here came running from there. He wants to go there.”

  “Really?” asked Lucy. She did not take offense, because her own grandfather who had been a farmer had come from Norway.

  “Well, I hope he goes somewhere,” Ellie said. “My father’s worried he’s liable to decide to move in with us. He practically lives here as it is.” Then, out the window, “Roy, your mother phoned to say she’s selling your bed.”

  But by this time he was under the car, the soles of his shoes all that was visible from the second floor. The only time that he appeared to experience the girls as alive was down in the living room, when he wouldn’t move his legs so much as half an inch, and the two had to step over him to get out through the French doors to the back lawn. Generally he acted as though teams had been chosen, himself and his Uncle Julian on one, and the two girls and Mrs. Sowerby on the other.

  But if there were such sides, Lucy Nelson had no sense that Irene Sowerby was on hers. Though Mrs. Sowerby was polite and hospitable to her face, Lucy was almost certain that behind her back the woman disapproved of who and what she was. The very first time Ellie had brought her home, Mrs. Sowerby had called Lucy “dear” right off the bat; and a week later Ellie was no longer her friend. She disappeared from her life as unexpectedly as she had come into it, and the person responsible was Irene Sowerby, Lucy was sure. Because of what she knew about Lucy’s family, or because of whatever she had heard about Lucy herself, Mrs. Sowerby had decided that she was not the kind of girl she wanted Ellie bringing home in the afternoons.

  That was in September of senior year. In February (as if four months of conduct not quite becoming so refined a young lady hadn’t intervened) Ellie slid a note, all cheery and intimate, into Lucy’s locker, and after school they were walking together up to The Grove. Of course Lucy should have left her own note in return: “No, thank you. You may be insensitive to the feelings of others but you are not going to be insensitive to mine and get away with it. I am not nothing, Ellie, whether your mother thinks so or not.” Or perhaps she should not have given Ellie the courtesy of any reply, and just let her show up at the flagpole at three-thirty to find no Lucy waiting breathlessly to be her idea of a “friend.”

  She felt bitter toward Eleanor, not only because she had picked her up so enthusiastically and dropped her so suddenly, but because Ellie’s instantaneous display of affection had caused Lucy to make a decision she wouldn’t otherwise have made, and which later she was to regret. But that was not really Eleanor’s fault as much as it was her own (or so she seemed willing to believe as sh
e reread the note scrawled across the blue stationery monogrammed EES at the top). The reason she should have nothing to do with Ellie Sowerby was because she was Ellie’s superior in every way imaginable, except for looks, which she didn’t care that much about; and money, which meant nothing; and clothes; and boys. But just as she had known Ellie to be her inferior, and had gone off with her when invited back for a second afternoon in September, so in the last week of February she followed along once again.

  Where else was there to go? Home? As of February 28 she had only two hundred more days to live in that house with those people (times twenty-four is four thousand eight hundred hours—sixteen hundred of them in bed, however) and then she would be down in the new Fort Kean branch of the women’s state college. She had applied for one of the fifteen full honors scholarships available to in-state students, and though Daddy Will said that to have received anything at all was an honor, she had been awarded only what the letter of congratulation called “A Living Aid Scholarship,” covering the yearly dorm bill of one hundred and eighty dollars. She would be graduating twenty-ninth in a class of one hundred and seventeen, and now she wished that she had worked and slaved for A’s in those courses like Latin and physics, where she had felt it a real victory to get even a B-minus. Not that financial difficulties were going to prevent her going off to school. Over the years her mother had somehow managed to save two thousand dollars for Lucy’s education; this, plus Lucy’s own eleven hundred dollars in savings, plus the Living Aid Scholarship, would see her through four years, provided she continued to work full time at the Dairy Bar in the summers and was careful about spending on extras. What disappointed her was that she had wanted to go off completely independent of them; as of September, 1949, she had hoped to have to rely upon them for nothing more for the rest of her life. The previous summer she had settled upon Fort Kean State College because it was the least expensive good school she could find, and the one where she had her strongest chance to get financial assistance; she had declined to apply anywhere else, even after her mother had revealed the existence of her secret “college fund.”

  Why Lucy detested taking the money was not only because it would continue to bind her to home, but because she knew how it had been paid out to her mother, and she knew why too. Almost into the fifth grade she had thought it made her rather special to be the daughter of Mrs. Nelson, the piano teacher; then, all at once, the kids waiting on the porch in warm weather or sitting on their coats in the hallway in winter, were her own classmates—and that fact caused her to be filled with a kind of dread. No matter how fast she ran home from school, no matter how silently she tried to make it into the house, there would always be some child already at the piano, invariably a boy, who invariably would turn his head away from his lesson in time to catch sight of his classmate, Lucy Nelson, scooting up the stairs to her room.

  At school she came to be known not as the kid whose mother gives the piano lessons but the kid whose father hangs around Earl’s Dugout—of that she was sure, though the division she now sensed between herself and her schoolmates was such that it did not permit her to ask what they actually thought, or to learn what it was they really did say behind her back. She pretended, of course, that hers was a normal household, even after she had begun to realize it was not—even after her mother’s pupils went back out into town to spread the story of what Lucy Nelson’s family was really like.

  Of course, when she was small, she was nearly able to believe it when she told her friends that it was actually her grandparents who lived with them in their house, and not the other way around. Right off she told new friends that why she couldn’t bring anyone home in the afternoon was because her grandmother, whom she loved dearly, had to take her nap then. And she had new friends often. There was a period when every girl her age who moved to town heard from Lucy about her grandmother’s nap. But then a new girl named Mary Beckley (whose family moved on again the following year) began to giggle at the story, and Lucy knew that somebody had already cornered Mary Beckley and told her Lucy’s secrets. This so angered Lucy that tears came popping out of her eyes, and that so frightened Mary that she swore on her life that she’d giggled only because her baby sister took naps too …

  Only, Lucy didn’t believe her. And from then on she refused ever to tell a lie again, to anyone about anything; from then on she brought no one to her home, and did not offer explanations for her behavior either. So, from the age of ten, though she had no friend who was her confidante, nobody she cared about ever saw her mother taking from her students the little envelopes of money (and saying, “Thank you very much,” so very, very sweetly), or what was far worse, the dread of dreads, saw her father coming through the front door and falling down drunk in the hall.

  Not even Kitty Egan, whom she discovered in her second year of high school, and who for four months was as intimate a companion as Lucy had ever had. Kitty didn’t go to Liberty Center High, but to the parish school of St. Mary’s. Lucy had just started working four nights a week at the Dairy Bar, and she met Kitty because of the scandal: Kitty’s older sister, Babs, who was only seventeen, had run away from home. She hadn’t even waited until Friday, when the girls at the Dairy Bar were paid, but had taken flight after work on a rainy Tuesday night, probably still in her waitress uniform. Her accomplice was an eighteen-year-old boy who swept up at the packing company and came from Selkirk. A post card addressed to “The Slaves at Dale’s Dairy Bar” and mailed from Aurora, Illinois, had arrived in town at the end of the week. “Headed for West Virginia. Keep up the good work, KIDS.” And signed, “Mrs. Homer ‘Babs’ Cook.”

  Kitty was sent around to the Dairy Bar by her father to pick up Babs’ wages for Monday and Tuesday. She was a tall, skinny girl whose most striking feature was the absence of any complexion; she had no more coloring than the inside of a potato, even when she came in out of the cold. At first she seemed as unlike Babs as she could be, until Lucy learned that Babs had dyed her hair black so as to look like Linda Darnell (it had originally been orange like Kitty’s); as for her skin, Babs caked it in so much mud, Kitty said, you would never know that actually she was part anemic.

  The family had always had their troubles with Babs. The only satisfaction she gave them was to wear crucifix earrings in her pierced ears and a cross around her neck, and that, Kitty said, was only to draw attention to the space between her breasts—which was the only real thing there anyway, the space. The breasts were things like toilet paper or her brother Francis’ socks that she stuffed into her brassiere. Babs wasn’t five minutes away from St. Mary’s—a dark brick building just by the Winnisaw Bridge—when she would duck into some alleyway to cover herself with pancake make-up, from the roots of her dyed hair to the tops of her homemade breasts, all the while puffing a Lucky Strike cigarette. Kitty told Lucy about the terrible thing she had once found in her sister’s purse—“Then I found this terrible thing once in her purse”—and when Babs discovered that Kitty had flushed it down the toilet, she screamed and yelled and struck her in the face. Kitty never told anyone—except the priest—for fear that her parents would severely punish her older sister, who, she said, needed mercy and forgiveness and love. Babs was a sinner and knew not what she was doing, and Kitty loved her, and every morning and every night she prayed for her sister living down there in West Virginia with a boy who Kitty believed was not even her husband.

  There were three more children at home, all younger than Kitty, and she prayed for them too, especially for Francis Jr., who was soon to have an operation for his “mastoidistis.” The Egans lived out near the Maurer Dairy Farm, where Mr. Egan worked, in a house that was nothing more than a dilapidated old shack. There were nails poking out of the timbers, and flypaper dangling, though it was already fall, and every unpainted two-by-four seemed to have its decoration of exposed wire. Lucy, upon entering, was afraid to move for fear of brushing up against something that would cause her to feel even more nausea and more despair than came from simply seeing the
place where Kitty had to eat and sleep and do her homework.

  And when Kitty said that in the afternoons her mother had to take a nap, Lucy was afraid to ask why, knowing that behind such a lie there could only be some dreadful truth she did not want to hear; she wanted only to get outside into the air, and so, thinking that the door nearest her led to the yard, she pushed against it. In a tiny room, asleep on a double bed, lay a pale woman in a long gray cotton slip, wearing on her left foot—in bed!—a crippled person’s shoe. Then she was introduced to Francis Jr., who instantly showed her the spot where he appeared to have been whacked with a stick behind the ear. And Joseph, aged eight, whom Kitty had to take into the house to change out of his overalls, which were—“as usual,” Kitty said—soaking wet. And tiny Bing—named for the singer—who just dragged his sleeping blanket around and around the backyard, crying for someone named Fay, who Kitty said didn’t even exist. And then Mr. Egan appeared, whom Lucy might even have liked for his big lumbering stride and his blazing green eyes had not Kitty earlier pointed to something hanging from a nail in the rear of an open shed, which she whispered was a cat-o’-nine-tails. In all, it was the most wretched and unhappy family Lucy had ever seen, heard of, or imagined; if possible, it was worse even than her own.

  She and Kitty began to meet regularly after school. Lucy, standing in the park across the street from St. Mary’s, would watch the Catholic kids rushing out the side doors and imagine them all going back to houses just like Kitty Egan’s, even though the old Snyders, who were Catholics and lived three doors down on Franklin Street, owned a house almost exactly like her Daddy Will’s.

  Lucy told Kitty her secret. They walked down to the south end of Water Street, and from a safe distance she pointed out the door to Earl’s Dugout of Buddies. Kitty whispered, “Is he there now?”