When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  “But there are limits. On all of us. People may want things, that doesn’t mean that we can give them.”

  “Please,” she said angrily, “don’t tell me what I know in that tone. I am not a child.”

  A moment passed. He stood.

  “But what’s going to happen to me? If you don’t help …”

  He came around to the side of his desk.

  “Don’t you care?” she asked. “What about my whole life!”

  For the first time she sensed his impatience. Then he spoke. “You cannot expect me, young lady, to save your life.”

  She rose; she faced him where he was standing at the door. “Please do not lecture me in that superior tone! I refuse to be lectured to by a perfect stranger who doesn’t know the first thing about all I have had to put up with in my life. I am not just another eighteen-year-old girl, and I won’t take your lectures!”

  “And what will you take instead?” he said sourly.

  “What?”

  “I’m asking what you expect, Lucy. You’re interesting,” he said, “in your expectations. You’re perfectly right—you are not just another eighteen-year-old girl.” He opened the door.

  “But what about my life? How can you be so cruel to me!”

  “I hope you come upon someone you can listen to” was his answer.

  “Well, I won’t,” she said in a low, fierce tone.

  “That would be too bad.”

  “Oh,” she said, buttoning her coat, “oh, I hope—I hope you’re happy, Doctor, when you go home to your nice house. I hope you’re happy with all your wisdom and your glasses and your doctor’s degree—and being a coward!”

  “Goodbye,” he said, blinking only once. “Good luck.”

  “Oh, I won’t rely on luck, Doctor. Or on people either.”

  “On what, then?”

  “Myself!” she said, and marched through the open door.

  “Good luck,” he said softly as she brushed by him, and then shut the door behind her.

  “You coward,” she moaned as she went rushing off to the coffee shop; “you weakling,” she wept as she carried the phone book into the booth at the back of the store; “you selfish, heartless, cruel—” as she drew her finger down the list of physicians in the yellow pages of the directory, imagining them one after another saying to her, “You cannot expect me, young lady, to save your life,” and seeing herself dragging from one office to another, humiliated, ignored and abused.

  On Thanksgiving Day they all sat down to the turkey and she told her family that she and Roy Bassart had decided to get married. “What?” her father said. She repeated herself. “Why?” he demanded to know, and slammed down the carving instruments.

  “Because we want to.”

  Within five minutes the only one still at the table was her grandmother. She alone ate right through to the mince pie while overhead various members of the family, in various ways, tried to get Lucy to unlock her door. Berta, however, said she was sick and tired of disorder and tragedy, and refused to allow every single pleasant moment to be destroyed by one person or another, year in and year out.

  Roy phoned at four in the afternoon. She came out of her bedroom to take the call, but would not speak until the kitchen was cleared of adults. Roy said that he couldn’t get away to see her before nine. But what had they said when he told them? Nothing. He hadn’t told them yet.

  At nine-thirty he telephoned from the Sowerbys’, saying that he had decided to wait until he was back in his own house, alone with his parents, before he broke the news. “Well, when will that be, Roy?” “I don’t know exactly. Well, how can I know exactly? Later.” But he was the one who had wanted to call them a week ago from Fort Kean; he was the one, she said, who had thought there was nothing that wrong with having to get married, so long as you were a couple who was going to marry anyway, probably, sooner or later. He was the one—

  “Here,” he said, “Ellie wants to talk to you.”

  “Roy!”

  “Hi,” Ellie said. “Hi, Lucy. Sorry about not writing.”

  “Hello, Eleanor.”

  “It’s just been work, work, work. You can imagine. I’m going crazy in this science course. Hey, we’re all rolling on the floor listening to Roy’s adventures in that Britannia school. What a place! And I’m actually drinking. Hey, come over.”

  “I have to stay home.”

  “I hope it’s not hard feelings, or anything, about not writing … Is it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Have I got things to tell you. I’ve met somebody marvelous,” Ellie whispered. “I almost sent you his picture. I mean, he’s perfect.”

  At midnight she came out of her bedroom to call Roy at his home. “Did you tell them?”

  “Listen, what are you doing? Everybody’s sleeping.”

  “Didn’t you tell them?”

  “It was too late.”

  “But I told mine!”

  “Look, my father’s shouting down the stairs asking who it is.”

  “Well, tell him!”

  “Will you please stop instructing me on what to do every minute?” he said. “I’ll do it when I’m—” Suddenly he hung up.

  She dialed again. Mr. Bassart picked up the phone. “Just who is this?” he asked.

  She didn’t breathe.

  “Look, no pranks at this hour, whoever you are. If it’s one of you boys in my fifth-period class, don’t think I’m not going to find out who.”

  In the morning she telephoned again.

  “I was going to call you,” Roy said.

  “Roy, when are you going to tell them?”

  “It’s only eight in the morning. We haven’t had breakfast, even. My Aunt Irene’s coming over.”

  “Then you did tell them.”

  “Who said that?”

  “That’s why your aunt’s coming to your house!”

  “How can you say that? How do you know that’s even true?”

  “Roy, what are you hiding from me?”

  “Nothing. Can’t you just let things settle for a few hours? My God.”

  “Why is your aunt coming over at eight o’clock in the morning? Who even called her?”

  “Oh, look, okay,” he said suddenly, “if you have to know—”

  “I do! Know what!”

  “Well, my father wants me to wait till June.”

  “Then you did tell them!”

  “… When we came home.”

  “Then why didn’t you say that last night!”

  “Because it just so happened that I wanted to give you good news, Lucy, not bad. I was trying to spare you, Lucy, but you won’t stop pushing me against my own timetable!”

  “Timetable? Roy, what are you talking about? How can we wait until June!”

  “But he doesn’t know about that!”

  “And don’t you tell him either, Roy!”

  “I have to hang up. She’s here.”

  At noon he called to say that he wasn’t driving back to Fort Kean until Monday, so perhaps she had better plan to take the bus down on Sunday night.

  “I’m calling from a booth, Lucy. I’m on my way to Mr. Brunn’s to pick up something for my father. I have to hurry—”

  “Roy, please explain instantly what this means.”

  “I’m trying to take care of some things and iron them out, all right? Do you mind?”

  “Roy! You can’t do this! I have to see you, right now!”

  “I’m hanging up, Lucy.”

  “No!”

  “Well, I am. I’m sorry. So get ready.”

  “If you hang up, I’m coming over to your house this minute. Hello? Do you hear me?”

  But the line had been disconnected.

  She called Eleanor’s house.

  “Ellie, it’s Lucy. I have to talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, not you too?”

  “… Me too, what?”

  “Ellie, you had to talk to me once—n
ow I have to talk to you. I have to know what’s going on, Ellie. I’ll come right over.”

  “Now? Lucy, you better not—right now, I mean.”

  “Is anybody home?”

  “No. But they’re all—going crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Roy says you want to marry him.”

  “He wants to marry me! Didn’t he say that?”

  “Well, yes … Well, sort of. He says he’s thinking about it … But, Lucy, they think you’re making him—Uh-oh, somebody’s pulling into the driveway. Everybody’s been driving back and forth all morning … Lucy?”

  “Yes.”

  “… Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Well, making him.”

  “No!”

  “Then-why?”

  “Because we want to!”

  “You do?”

  “Yes!”

  “But—”

  “But what, Eleanor!”

  “Well … you’re so young. We all are. I mean, it’s a surprise. I guess I just don’t know what I mean, really.”

  “Because you’re a dope, Ellie! Because you’re a stupid, insipid, self-centered, selfish dope!”

  In the early evening she took a bus back to Fort Kean. The doors to The Bastille were chained shut, and she had to walk all around the cold campus before she found the watchman. He led her over to the Buildings and Grounds Office in Barracks Number Three, sat her down in a chair, and took out his spectacles to look for her name in the student directory.

  And all those names printed in the register made her think: Run away. Who would ever find her?

  In her room she beat her fists on the pillow, on the headboard, on the wall. It was awful. It was horrible. Every other college girl in America was home right now, having a good time with her friends and her family. Yet her mother had begged, her grandfather had begged, even her father had asked her to stay. They said that it was just that they were stunned by the news. Wouldn’t she agree, they reasoned through the door, that it was a little unexpected? They would try to get used to it, if only she wouldn’t run off like this on a holiday weekend. They were shocked at first, and had maybe lost their heads. It was, after all, only the first semester of that college life she had been dreaming about for so long. But probably she knew what she was doing, if her mind was made up the way it sounded that it was. So wouldn’t she stay through Monday? When she was fifteen years old and on her own decided on Catholic as her religious preference, had they stood in her way? No, she had insisted that it was what she wanted, and they had decided to let her go ahead. And later, when she had changed her mind, and turned back to Presbyterian again, well, that too had been her own decision, made on her own, without interference from any person in the family. And the same with the snare drum. Another decision made on her own, that they had honored and respected, until finally she decided to give that up too.

  Of course they weren’t meaning to draw any comparison between taking up the snare drum and taking a husband for life; but their attitude had been that if she preferred beating the drums to resuming piano (which, they reminded her, she had dropped at ten, her own decision once again), or beginning something like accordion, which had been Daddy Will’s compromise suggestion, they had no choice but to let her have her way. Their house was not a dictatorship; it was a democracy, in which every person had his ideas—and was respected for them too. “I may not believe what you say,” said Daddy Will through the door, “but I will fight for your right to say it.” So wouldn’t she reconsider and not rush off now to some lonely, empty school? Why didn’t she stay and talk it over? After all, Grandma had been baking all week, and for her. “For Thanksgiving,” said Lucy. “Well, honey, that’s not much different, when you think about it. It’s your first big weekend home from college, there isn’t one of us doesn’t realize … Lucy? Are you listening to me?”

  But what about her father acting as though the whole thing was a monumental tragedy? Since when did anything having to do with her sacrifices, her suffering, bring tears to his eyes? She could not bear the pretense. And who said she was quitting college? He kept wandering around the house, crying, “I wanted her to go to college,” but who had said she wasn’t? All she had said was that she was getting married to Roy … Or did they know why without her explaining further? Were they content to accept what she told them, simply to avoid the humiliation of confronting the truth? She picked up her French grammar and threw it clear across the room. “They don’t even know,” she said aloud, “and still they’re letting me do it!”

  If only they’d say no. NO, LUCY, YOU CANNOT. NO, LUCY, WE FORBID IT. But it seemed that none of them had the conviction any longer, or the endurance, to go against a choice of hers. In order to survive, she had set her will against theirs long ago—it was the battle of her adolescence, but it was over now. And she had won. She could do whatever in the world she wanted—even marry someone she secretly despised.

  When Roy returned to Fort Kean on Monday evening, and switched on the light in his room, he found Lucy sitting in a chair by the window.

  “What are you doing here?” he cried, dropping his suitcase. “The shades are up!”

  “Then pull them down, Roy.”

  Instantly he did. “How did you get inside?”

  “How do I always get inside, Roy? On all fours.”

  “Is she home?”

  “Who?”

  “My landlady!” he whispered, and without another word, slipped out the door and into the hallway. She heard him whistling his way up the stairs and into the bathroom. You sigh, the song begins, you speak and I hear … Overhead she even heard him flush the toilet. Then he was sliding into the room again. “She’s out,” he said, shutting the door. “We better turn off the lights.”

  “So you won’t have to look at me?”

  “So she doesn’t find you here, if she comes home. Well, she just might come home. Well, what’s the matter with you?” She rose and clutched her stomach. “Take a guess!”

  “Shhhh.”

  “But she’s out.”

  “But she’ll be back! We always have the lights out, Lucy.’”

  “But I want to talk to you, and face to face, not on a phone, Roy, where you can—”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but the lights are going off. So get ready.”

  “But are we getting married or aren’t we? Tell me, so I know what to do next, or where to go, or God knows what.”

  “Well, at least let me take my coat off, will you, please?”

  “Roy, yes or no.”

  “Well, how can I give you a yes or no answer when it’s not a yes or no question?”

  “But that’s exactly what it is.”

  “Will you calm down? I’ve been driving for two hours.”

  While he was hanging his coat in the closet, she came up behind him and stood on her toes. “Yes or no, Roy!” up toward his ear, which was still a foot above her.

  He ducked away from her. “Now, first, I’m turning the lights off. Just to be safe. Well, look, Lucy, I agreed when I rented here not to have girls in my room.”

  “But you had me, Roy, and plenty.”

  “But she doesn’t know about it! Oh, darn it. Here go the lights,” and without pausing to hear an objection, he turned them off.

  “Okay, now you don’t have to look at me, Roy. Tell me what happened over your long Thanksgiving holiday. While I was down here in an empty dormitory all by myself for two whole days.”

  “First off, I didn’t tell you to go back to any empty dorm. Second, I’m going to sit down, if you don’t mind. And why don’t you sit, too?”

  “I’ll stand, thank you.”

  “In the dark?”

  “Yes!”

  “Shhhh!”

  “Begin,” she said.

  “Well, let me get settled … Okay.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got them to come around part way.”

  “Continue.”

  “Oh, sit down
, will you?”

  “What’s the difference? You can’t see me.”

  “I do too see you! Hanging over me. Sit down, please.”

  She had been waiting for over an hour. It wasn’t sitting she wanted, it was sleep. She lowered herself onto the edge of the bed and closed her eyes. Go to Mr. Valerio. Run away. But neither idea made sense. If she should see anyone, it was Father Damrosch. But what would he do? That was precisely his trouble: he couldn’t do anything. He was about as much help as Saint Teresa, or Jesus Christ. He looked so strong, and listened to everything she said, and said such beautiful things himself … but it wasn’t beautiful things she needed to hear. Something had to be done.

  “First off,” he was saying, “don’t think it was easy for me. It was hell, actually.”

  “What was?”

  “Pretending you weren’t pregnant, Lucy, when everybody kept asking me over and over again why?”

  “And did you tell them?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes! Shhhhh!”

  “You’re the one who’s shouting.”

  “Well, you make me.”

  “You might be shouting because you’re lying, Roy.”

  “I did not tell them, Lucy! Will you stop accusing? Actually, I keep wondering why I don’t. Why can’t I just speak the simple truth? If we’re going to be married anyway.”

  “Are we?”

  “Well, we would be … if I told them, I mean.”

  “You mean if you don’t, we’re not?”

  “Well, that’s the point. That’s what’s so confused. I mean, they had so many arguments for why we should at least wait until June.”

  “And?”

  “And, well, they’re all good arguments. I mean, it’s just hard to argue against a good argument, that’s all.”

  “So you said you’d wait.”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  “But how can we?”

  “Look, I had to get out of the house, didn’t I? I’ve missed a whole day of school already.”

  “You have a car, you can drive—”

  “But I couldn’t leave it the way it was! Don’t you understand anything!”

  “Why couldn’t you? Why didn’t you?”

  “Why should they all be furious at me, Lucy, and so confused about everything? I’m not doing anything wrong. The opposite, in fact, the very opposite! Why don’t we just tell the truth? I don’t have to lie to my parents, you know.”