When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  Roy had organized the day’s outing, and had his mother prepare the lunch as his own farewell party to Joe Whetstone, whom he had come to consider his closest buddy. Lucy herself had always thought of Joe as one big blah. Sure, he was a great athlete, she supposed, and you had to admit he was handsome and rugged-looking, if you liked that type, but he had not a single opinion of his own on any subject. Whatever you said, Joe agreed with. There were times when she felt like reciting the Declaration of Independence just to watch his head go up and down and to hear him say, after every famous sentence, “You bet, that sure is true, that sure does make a lot of sense, boy, that’s just what my Mom says …” The temptation to reveal him for the imbecile that he was came over her most strongly when Roy was purposely acting for Joe’s benefit, telling some funny story about what had happened to him up in the Aleutians, or discussing some college football team he and Joe called “The Crimson Tide” and which normally he didn’t seem to be interested in at all. But she had never given in to the temptation; she hadn’t even told Ellie her real opinion of Joe Whetstone. And now it was too late. Now Joe had gotten Ellie into trouble, the worst kind of trouble there could possibly be for a girl. And Joe didn’t even appear to know it.

  Roy called to Joe. “Appling’s up. Two on. No score.”

  “Go, Luke,” said Joe, knocking the wooden ball clear through a wicket at the other end of the lawn. “Hey, Joe the Arm,” he said.

  “Oh, boy,” Roy said sourly, “swing and a miss. Strike one.”

  “Come on, Lukey babe,” said Joe, posing with his mallet like a batter all coiled up to swing. “Hey,” said Joe, “Stan the Man,” and he changed his batting stance and swung at an imaginary ball. “Gooing, going—”

  “Foul!” said Roy.

  “Shucks,” said Joe, “pulled it too hard.”

  “Shhh,” said Roy, looking quickly up at the house as Joe fell to the lawn laughing.

  … What about college now? What about the Sowerbys? What about Ellie’s future, if she had to marry Joe Whetstone? And what if he already knew and didn’t care? Maybe he wanted to marry Ellie, but she was crying because she didn’t want to marry him!

  “I have—I have to tell somebody,” Ellie said, turning to Lucy and clutching the pillow to her chest.

  “What?” said Lucy softly. “Tell what, Ellie?”

  Ellie pushed her head back into the pillow and again began to weep. She had done a stupid thing. A terrible, stupid thing. Her whole life would never be the same.

  “… Why? What is it?”

  She had listened in on someone else’s telephone conversation. “And it’s not the first time, either,” said Ellie, sobbing.

  Then she’s not pregnant.

  Down below Roy said, “Base hit!”

  “Go, Sox,” said Joe. “Pour it on, baby.”

  “And the run scores!” cried Roy. “And another! Two nothing!”

  Petulantly Lucy said, “What do you mean? Ellie, I can’t understand you.”

  “I listened in on someone else’s telephone conversation … and it was awful.”

  “Whose?”

  “Oh, Lucy, I don’t want my mother to know. Never!”

  “Know what?”

  “Is the door locked?” asked Ellie.

  “You locked it,” said Lucy impatiently.

  “Then … Sit over here. On the bed. I don’t want to shout. Oh, I don’t know what to do. This is so awful … I’ve been trying to tell you for so long. I needed somebody’s advice that I could talk it over with … But I just couldn’t. And I shouldn’t. Oh, but I just have to—but, Lucy, you have to promise me. You can’t repeat it to anyone. Not even Roy. Especially not Roy.”

  “Ellie, I don’t even understand what you’re—”

  “My father!” said Ellie. “Lucy, don’t tell ever—do you promise? You have to promise me, Lucy. Please, so I can tell you.”

  “I promise.”

  “My father has women!” Ellie burst out. “On the side!”

  Lucy received these words with equanimity: it was as though a truth she had known in her heart all along had finally been confessed by Eleanor.

  “And that’s not all,” said Ellie. “Lucy … he gives them money.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know he does?”

  “That’s what I heard on the phone.” She closed her eyes. “Actual money,” she said, and the tears rolled off her cheeks onto her white polo shirt.

  Just then they heard the door to Mrs. Sowerby’s room open, down the hall.

  “Dear, are you in there?” she asked.

  “Yes. Lucy too. We’re only talking, Mother.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “It got too hot, Mother,” said Ellie, frantically wiping her eyes. “But I’m fine. I promise. It was practically a hundred, though. And buggy. And crowded. All kinds of people from Winnisaw.”

  For a moment they heard nothing; then the sound of Mrs. Sowerby descending the stairs. Neither of them spoke until the screen door opened down below and Joe was saying, “Sox are out in front, Mrs. Sowerby, four to nothing.”

  “Sure,” said Roy, “she’s the right one to tell, all right. Hey, Aunt Irene, tell Joe which team Luke Appling plays for. No, no, tell him what a bunt is. Come on, give him your great definition of a bunt.”

  Roy and Joe could be heard down on the back lawn, teasing Mrs. Sowerby about sports, and Mrs. Sowerby could be heard obligingly making them laugh … while upstairs Eleanor began to tell Lucy the whole story.

  It had begun about a year ago, on a summer night when she and her father had been home alone. It was after eleven and she was in bed, when suddenly she remembered she had forgotten to tell Judy Rollins not to say anything to anyone about something Ellie had told her, and so she reached over and picked up her bedside telephone. Of course, the instant she heard her father talking on the downstairs line she knew she should hang up. Only, the voice on the other end she recognized as belonging to nobody but Mrs. Mayerhofer, the manager of Daddy’s laundromat in Selkirk, about whom he was always complaining to her mother. Mrs. Mayerhofer was, as he put it, a little slow on the pickup; there actually wasn’t a single thing that he didn’t have to explain to her ten times before she got it right. He kept her on almost solely out of pity—abandoned by her husband, she had an infant child to support—and because, unlike her predecessor, the illustrious Mrs. Jarvis, it didn’t appear that Mrs. Mayerhofer was going to steal him deaf, dumb and blind.

  On the phone her father was saying that he just couldn’t get up to Selkirk until the end of the week because he was so tied up right here in Liberty Center, and Mrs. Mayerhofer said that she didn’t think she could wait until the end of the week, and Ellie still remembered thinking, “Boy, what a moron,” until she heard her father laugh and say that in the meantime then she was just going to have to make do with the old hot-water bottle. Mrs. Mayerhofer laughed, and Ellie said it was as though her bones and her blood and everything inside her had turned to stone. She pushed the receiver down into her pillow and held it there for what seemed like ages; when at last she raised it to her ear again, the line was free—and so she called Rollins. What else could she do?

  This was just before she and Lucy had first gotten to know each other, Ellie said. Actually, she had been dying back then to tell Lucy what she had overheard, only she’d felt so ashamed and embarrassed—and very shortly so uncertain as to whether what she had heard meant what she had taken it to mean—that she decided to stop seeing Lucy entirely for the time being, rather than risk ruining their friendship and making a terrible fool of herself and her family.

  For the moment Ellie’s words confused Lucy, and not simply because of the disordered way in which her friend offered her explanation. She had to work out in her head the significance of all that Ellie had just said—that is, the significance to herself.

  She would lie awake, Ellie was saying, just lie awake after that for hours on end, in dread
of ever overhearing such a conversation again … and then silently lift the phone off the receiver. It was a nightmare; she didn’t want to catch him, and she couldn’t stop trying to. Then that winter her father came home one evening and said that Mrs. Mayerhofer (“my mental giant” was his expression) had flown the coop; just disappeared from her apartment in Selkirk—baby, baggage and all. The very next day he drove up to interview and hire somebody else for the job. The woman selected was named Edna Spatz.

  And that was all that had happened. She never heard him with Mrs. Mayerhofer on the phone a second time, nor was there any reason for her to suspect Edna Spatz. Yet every time her father went off to the Selkirk store, Ellie knew it was to carry on behind her mother’s back—even though she knew too that Edna Spatz had a husband in Selkirk and two small children. This was about the time she and Lucy had started seeing each other again, and on more occasions than she could even count, Ellie had wanted to blurt out to her the whole horrible story about Mrs. Mayerhofer. Only Mrs. Mayerhofer was so terribly dumb and uneducated. So he couldn’t with her, he simply couldn’t. He simply wouldn’t even want to.

  Or so she had gotten herself to believe, until last night. She had been on the stairs when the phone rang, and so she raced up to her room thinking that it was Joe, who had said he would call around nine. In the meantime her father had picked up the downstairs phone; “It’s okay, Princess,” he had called up to her, “it’s just for me.” She had called back, “Okay, Daddy,” and gone ahead into her room, closed the door, and without any knowledge that she was even going to do it, gently lifted the phone off the hook. At first she couldn’t even hear the words being spoken. It was as though she had a heart beating in her head, and another in her throat, and the rest of her simply didn’t exist. On the other end a woman was speaking. Whether it was Edna Spatz, she didn’t know. She had come to imagine Mrs. Spatz as no less a dimwit than Mrs. Mayerhofer, and the trouble with the voice on the other end was that it sounded smart … and young. The woman was saying that if she couldn’t cover her check she didn’t know what would happen to her. Her father said this was something he would have to take care of later—and not by telephone. He was whispering into the phone, but he was angry. The woman began to cry. She said that the agency had threatened to take her to court. She called him Julian, Julian, and she wept. She said she was sorry, she knew she shouldn’t call, she had dialed and hung up half a dozen times over the weekend, but who else did she have to turn to but Julian, Julian?

  It was at that point that Ellie felt she could not bear to hear another word. The woman sounded so unhappy—and so young! So she buried the phone in the pillow again, and just sat there, not knowing what to do. Only a minute or so later her father called up the stairs to her. She replaced the phone as quietly as she could and came quickly down to him, chattering gaily all the while. She knew he was watching her every expression to see whether she had been listening, but Ellie was sure that she had not given herself away in anything she had said or done. She kept talking about Joe this and Joe that, and instantly sat next to him on the couch when invited to—“Keep me company, Daisy Mae”—and even let him hold her hand while the two of them watched TV together and ate all those cherries. That’s why she had consumed so much junk; she was afraid to stop for fear he would think something was bothering her. And all the time they were sitting on the couch she had the most absurd thought: that she had an older sister, whom she knew nothing about, and that it was she who had been on the phone asking her father to send money. Of course she was only making up the idea of a sister, and knew it—and so then she began to think that maybe she was making up the whole incident.

  “Lucy, I’m so confused—and miserable! Because I just don’t know. Do you think it’s true?”

  “What’s true?”

  “What I heard.”

  “Well, you heard it, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Yes! But who is it? Who could it possibly be? And my poor mother,” she said, weeping profusely once again, “she doesn’t even know. Nobody knows. Nobody but you and me—and him … and her!”

  All the youngsters were invited to stay for supper on the Sowerby lawn: roast beef sandwiches, corn on the cob, apple pie and ice cream—except for Ellie, who had consommé, half of which she left in the bowl. Mr. Sowerby offered each of the boys a bottle of beer, against Mrs. Sowerby’s better judgment. “Come on, they’ll all be in college in a week. Roy here is responsible for us winning the war against the North Pole. A little beer’ll do him good, put some hair on his chest.”

  Joe took a sip and laid the glass aside; Roy drank his right out of the bottle. Then he opened the top button of his shirt and looked inside. “Nothing,” he said.

  They sat out on the lawn till long after dark. Ellie was stretched out in a beach chair with an afghan thrown over her, and just her head sticking out. It looked very, very small. Roy sat on the grass, holding his beer bottle in one hand; his head swung back against Lucy’s legs whenever he took a swig from the bottle. Joe Whetstone was stretched out on his stomach, his chin resting on his two fists. He was looking up at the sky, and every once in a while he said, “Boy, oh, boy. Look at them all.”

  Roy said he’d known a guy in the service who believed in the stars. Joe said, “No kidding.”

  “Absolutely,” said Roy, “to some people it’s practically a religion in itself.”

  “No kidding,” said Joe. “I wonder how many there really are.”

  Julian Sowerby asked how his Princess was.

  “Better,” she answered after a moment.

  “I believe you were just missing home,” said Julian Sowerby, “before you even went away from it.”

  “Boy, I’ll bet that can happen,” said Joe.

  “Sure, sure. Homesick, plus all that vanilla fudge ice cream with, I understand from reliable sources, a little butterscotch sauce, and walnuts—”

  “Roy!” cried Ellie weakly.

  Roy and Joe laughed.

  “Roy, don’t tease her,” said Mrs. Sowerby.

  “Sorry, Ellie-o,” said Roy.

  Julian lit a cigar. “How about it, Joe?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” Joe said. “Got to stay in shape.”

  “Won’t affect your toe, boy,” Julian said.

  “No, thank you just the same, Mr. Sowerby. Didn’t mean to waste the beer either.”

  “Take it off my taxes,” said Julian, to Joe’s amusement. “How about you, General?” he asked Roy.

  “Sure,” said Roy, “if it’s a good one. Toss.”

  Julian threw a cigar his way. “Fourteen-fifty a box, it ain’t what I could call a stinkweed, wise guy.”

  The smoke from Roy’s cigar rose around his head. “Not too bad,” he said, holding it off at arm’s length and muffling a cough.

  “A real pro,” said Uncle Julian.

  Ordinarily Lucy couldn’t stand to watch Roy smoke a cigar or drink a beer; he really cared very little for either. But this evening there were matters more grave to brood upon than Roy’s showing off for his uncle. There was the uncle himself, whose secret had finally been revealed; there was Ellie, who knew the secret; there was Mrs. Sowerby, who did not; and there was herself. All these months she had been believing that Ellie was indifferent to her past, and suddenly it was clear that nothing but that past had caused Ellie to befriend her in September, and to resume that “friendship” again in February. It was a startling discovery. All this time, so stupidly, so innocently, so dreamily, she had been thinking that to Ellie Sowerby she was not the kid whose father hung out at Earl’s Dugout, not the kid who had gained notoriety by calling the police to come take him away, when that was precisely who she was. All she was. It had caused her much pain that afternoon to understand that all of her attraction for Ellie lay in that past which she herself wanted never to think about again so long as she lived.

  And it had made her angry too. Her temptation earlier in the afternoon had been to rise in indignation and tell Ellie exactly what sh
e thought of her. “You mean that’s what I am to you, Ellie? That’s why you wanted me to be a friend? To my face, you actually have the nerve to admit that when you dropped me, it was because you believed you didn’t need me any more? And what exactly did you think I was going to do for you, anyway, in return for letting me wear your precious sweater?”

  On and on and on, but in her head only. At first she restrained her anger so as to hear the story of Julian Sowerby’s deception to its conclusion, but even before Ellie had finished, she began to understand Eleanor’s attraction to her as something else entirely. Ellie actually admired her. Her courage. Her pride. Her strength. Wasn’t that a deeper way, a truer way, to see it? Ellie Sowerby, with all her clothes, and boys, and beauty, and money, had turned for help and advice—to her.

  Well, what should Ellie do, then? What? Her mind began to examine the possibilities.

  “Hey, what happened to Blondie tonight?” Julian was asking. “Cat got Cutie-Pie’s tongue?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Thinking about college, aren’t you, Lucy?” said Mrs. Sowerby.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s going to be a wonderful experience for all of you,” said Irene Sowerby. “These will be the four most beautiful years of your life.”

  “That’s what my Mom says too, Mrs. Sowerby,” said Joe.

  “Yes, it’s going to do all of you a world of good,” said Mrs. Sowerby, “to be away from home.”

  Poor Mrs. Sowerby. Poor woman. How mortifying. How wrong. How unjust … It was the first time that her heart had opened fully to Ellie’s mother. She saw at last that she was something more than her own potential enemy. To understand that Mrs. Sowerby suffered was somehow to understand that she existed, had a life, had motives and reasons having nothing to do with frustrating and opposing Lucy Nelson. The fact was that she had never opposed her. The decision Ellie had made to stop seeing Lucy back in September had, by her own admission, nothing at all to do with any instructions she had received from her mother. Only now could Lucy see that during these past months Mrs. Sowerby had never been anything but kind to her. Her ways might be somewhat old-fashioned and her manner a little remote, but was that so bad? What harm had she ever done Lucy? My God, it wasn’t Mrs. Sowerby who had been small-minded, it had been Lucy herself! She should be ashamed of herself for her suspicions. Even when she had appeared wearing one of Ellie’s cashmere sweaters, Mrs. Sowerby’s exasperation probably had to do entirely with Eleanor’s barely disguised condescension, and nothing to do with disapproval of Lucy for being covetous of her daughter’s clothes. She was a patient, gentle and sympathetic person—look at her treatment not only of Lucy, but of Roy. She alone, of his entire family, seemed to take his problems and dilemmas seriously; she alone accorded him genuine respect. Who had the dignity, the self-possession of Mrs. Sowerby? She could think of no one.