by Philip Roth
And so she told Roy what Ellie had overheard on the telephone. At first he was unbelieving, and then he was appalled, he said.
By the fourth summer of their marriage Roy found he had to tune the car up practically every month. It was now seven years old and you couldn’t expect it to hold up forever without an awful lot of care. Not that he was complaining, just stating a fact. More than one Sunday morning a month Lucy looked down into the driveway to see Roy’s feet sticking out from under the car, as she used to see them from Ellie’s bedroom window. And once she saw him holding Edward up over the hood, explaining to him how the engine worked.
If Roy didn’t have a wedding to photograph on Sundays, the three of them would go out for a ride, or else up to Liberty Center to visit Roy’s family. To make the traveling time pass more rapidly, Roy would often amuse Edward by telling him about his Army days up near the North Pole. They were simple little stories about how Daddy had done this and Daddy had done that—stories involving penguins and igloos and dogs that pulled sleds over the snow—and what sometimes made her anger rise was not so much that the child naturally took them for the truth, but that Roy seemed to want him to.
She might no longer even have consented to those Sunday trips if it hadn’t been for Edward, who loved so the idea that he had grandparents he had to travel to see. They kissed him, they hugged him, they gave him presents, they made him laugh, they told him what a beautiful, brilliant little boy was he … And why shouldn’t he enjoy that? Why should he be denied anything that came as a matter of course to other children in other families? Visiting grandparents was a part of childhood, and whatever was a part of childhood he was going to have.
It pleased her far less to see how willingly her husband made the trip. He pretended, of course, that it was more or less a bore to him at this point, that he did it out of filial obligation, a sense of duty and decency, but then he had been pretending that from the start.
She saw him pretending now nearly all the time, so as to avoid the clashes that had taken place almost weekly after the first six months of the marriage. Every time he opened his mouth she could hear that he did not mean a single word, but was trying only to disarm her by saying what he thought she wanted him to say. He would do anything now to avoid a battle, anything but really change.
He pretended, for instance, that he was more or less happy working for Hopkins. Wendell had his limitations, but-then-who-didn’t? he quickly added. Yeah, good old Wendell, when all the time she knew that secretly he hated Hopkins’ guts.
And he pretended that he believed she had been right to discourage him from opening a studio of his own. There was still an awful lot he had to learn, and he was only twenty-four, so what was the hurry? Meanwhile, at least once a month she would find lettered in the margin of the newspaper, or doodled on the scratch pad by the phone, the words “Bassart Portrait Studio,” or “Portraits by Bassart.”
Worst of all, he pretended to continue to feel outrage toward Julian Sowerby. After her disclosure of Julian’s secret, Roy had agreed that henceforth they must have nothing whatsoever to do with such a person. Yet as the months passed, he began to wonder if they weren’t being somewhat unfair to his aunt. She might care to see Edward once in a while …
Lucy said that if Irene Sowerby wanted to see Edward badly enough she could come to visit any Sunday afternoon they were at the Bassarts’. Roy said that was true, of course, only his understanding was that Aunt Irene believed that they were as angry at her for interfering in their marriage as they were with Uncle Julian. The deeper cause of the split with Julian was something she didn’t know about, and that they couldn’t reveal to her, or to his family either. It was horrible to think of Aunt Irene living in ignorance of her husband’s real nature, but they had problems enough of their own, Roy had decided, without trying to extricate Aunt Irene from hers. Furthermore, wasn’t she better off not knowing? And that wasn’t the issue anyway. The issue was this: Irene believed Lucy and Roy to be angry with her—
Lucy wished to inform Roy that Irene Sowerby wasn’t altogether wrong.
What? Were they as angry with her? Really? A year later?
Lucy went on. She knew what his mother whispered to him on Sundays. Perhaps next time Roy should take the opportunity to whisper back to his mother that her sister Irene might have considered the welfare of this little nephew she so missed seeing when Julian Sowerby started arranging for Roy’s divorce!
What?
Unless, of course, Roy didn’t see in Julian’s scheme anything that might endanger Edward’s development as a healthy, happy child. Maybe Roy even agreed with his uncle that the well-being of one’s family did not matter nearly so much as the satisfaction of one’s own selfish desires.
Well, no. Well, of course not. Look, was she kidding? He had been appalled, hadn’t he, practically sickened to hear about Uncle Julian and his women? And didn’t she think he still was? Sometimes when he began to think about Julian’s playing around like that all those years, it made him so disgusted and angry he didn’t even know what to do. Was she kidding, to associate him with Julian Sowerby? Had he not said no to the whole idea of a divorce, once he gave it five minutes’ thought? Look, marriage isn’t something you just throw out of the window, like an old shoe. Marriage isn’t something that you enter into idly, or that you dissolve idly either. The more he thought about it the more he realized that marriage was probably the most serious thing you did in your whole life. After all, the family was the backbone of society. Take away the family, and what do you have? People just running around, that’s all. Total anarchy. Just try to imagine the world with no families. You actually can’t do it. Oh, sure, some people of course run off to a divorce lawyer at the drop of a hat. First sign of anything that doesn’t sit right with them, boom, off to the divorce court—and the heck with the children, the heck with the other person. However, if a couple has any maturity at all they sit down and talk out their differences, they voice their grievances, and then when everybody has had a chance to make his accusations—and also to admit where he might have been in the wrong (because it’s never so simple as one being all in the right, of course, and the other all in the wrong)—then, instead of running off to Reno, Nevada, two people who have any maturity stop being kids, buckle down and really decide to work at the marriage. Because that’s the key word, all right—work—which you don’t know, of course, when you go waltzing merrily into holy matrimony, thinking it is going to be more or less a continuation of your easygoing pre-marital good times. No, marriage is work, and hard work too, and pretty darn important work when there happens to be a little child involved, who needs you the way nobody has ever needed you before in your life.
She could not stand the pretense; so she tried with all her might to believe that it was not pretense, that he actually believed what he was saying, and found she could not stand that either.
After dinner and a visit with the Bassarts, they would drive Edward around to Daddy Will’s house. First Great-Grandmother brought out the cookies that had been baked especially for him; then Great-Grandfather did tricks that he said he had used to do for Edward’s mother when she was a little girl. He would make Edward close his eyes while he wrapped his fist and two projecting fingers into a white handkerchief. Then, well, well, he’d say, open your eyes, Edward Bassart, there’s a little bunny here that would like to make your acquaintance. And there was a bunny, with two long ears and a little mouth, and an endless number of questions about Edward and his Mommy and Daddy. At the end of the conversation, Edward was allowed to whisper a wish into the bunny’s ear. Once, to the delight of all assembled—except Daddy Will, who believed he had some small ability to throw his voice—Edward announced that what he wished most was that the bunny was real.
“What do you mean, real?” asked the great-grandfather.
“Real. Not a hankie.”
Best of all Edward liked to climb up onto the piano bench, either beside Grandma Myra, while she played for him, or ri
ght in her lap so that he could “play.” She would take his fingers in hers, and haltingly out of the piano would come “Frère Jacques” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and a song called “Michael Finnegan,” to which Daddy Will had taught him the words. At every visit Edward and Grandma Myra and Daddy Will would sing it together, while the child’s great-grandmother sat with the cookie plate in her lap, and his father, his long frame stretched out in a chair, kept time by tapping the toe of one shoe against the toe of the other.
I know a man named Michael Finnegan,
He grew whiskers on his chin-negan,
Along came the wind and blew them in-negan,
Poor old Michael Finnegan—begin-negan.
And so again they would begin, while silently Lucy watched. These were all the songs, said Grandma Myra, that Edward’s mother used to like to sing when she was a little child no older than he was. Lucy saw that her son did not understand what that meant at all. His mother had been a little child? He couldn’t believe it, no more than she could.
Then there was the famous story of her “yumping” from the window seat in the dining room, of which she had no recollection either. The first day that Daddy Will introduced Edward to the sport, Grandma Myra disappeared into the bathroom and did not come out until the visitors had left for home.
In the years since the disappearance of her husband, Myra had come to look her age, and more; there were Sundays when she seemed less a woman in her early forties than a woman into her sixties. Deep creases ran to the corners of her mouth, a purple hue had seeped into the skin beneath the eyes, the lovely throat had lost its smoothness and its glow. Yet the coarsening, the darkening, the wearing away, did nothing to diminish her air of delicacy. Certainly it was easier, even for those who believed they had known her intimately, to understand how deeply rooted in her nature was that characteristic softness of appearance. The years passed, the woman aged, and soon it became more and more difficult, even for her daughter, to remember that the reason Myra Nelson had suffered such abuse in her marriage was because essentially she was no more than her Daddy’s little girl. Time passed, and very slowly, sitting silently in that living room, observing now as she had never been able to while the battle raged, while she herself raged—very slowly it began to dawn on Lucy that her aging mother actually had a character. “Weak” and “insipid” no longer seemed adequate to an understanding of the whole person. It began to dawn on her that why the mouth had always looked so gentle, and the eyes so merciful, and the body so yielding was not simply because her mother had been born dumb and beautiful.
Time passed, and men began to appear in the parlor on Sundays. They were invited for dinner, and to spend the afternoon. At first it was young Hank Wirges, who wasn’t exactly what you could call a man, of course. He was a nice-looking, dark-haired boy who had taken journalism at Northwestern, where he had used to date a girl who was a sorority sister of Ellie Sowerby. Hank had come to Winnisaw to work as a cub reporter on the Leader, and had looked up the Carrolls because his grandmother and Berta had been childhood friends years and years ago.
Once a week Hank took Myra to the movie, Dutch treat, and every Sunday he was invited to the house for dinner. It pleased them all to be kind to him and make him feel that he had a home away from home, but of course no one was surprised when after a year the movie dates became less frequent. Eventually he asked if he might bring to Sunday dinner a girl named Carol-Jean, whom it turned out he had been seeing on the side.
It was actually just as well that Hank got himself involved with this Carol-Jean, said Willard, for it had begun to seem that he was developing a full-scale crush on Myra; though he never called her anything but Mrs. Nelson, he looked up to her like some sort of goddess. He came twice to dinner with his young lady friend, and then Myra went through a bad siege of migraines and Hank sort of passed out of their lives. But at least he had been a kind of gradual start back into the world for her, as Daddy Will phrased it, in that year after “Whitey’s picking up, going off, and finally showing his true colors.” That was a time when Myra hardly had it in her to be seen on Broadway; if she hadn’t had young Hank’s homesickness to pay attention to, she might have done nothing but give her lessons in the afternoon, and then retire back to her bed to weep for all those years thrown away on somebody who had “turned out to be hardly the person we all originally expected of him.”
Lucy herself never gave her father a moment’s thought, not if she could help it; when his name was mentioned, she simply tuned out. His welfare was of no more concern to her than hers had been to him; where he was now, what he was now, that was his business—and his doing too. She might have been the one to lock that door, but what had sent him running was his own shame and cowardice. When Edward was still an infant and they had just moved into the new apartment, the phone had rung one night while she was home alone, and to her “Hello,” the other party had made no response. “Hello?” she had said again, and then she knew that it was her father, that he was in Fort Kean, that he was planning to take his vengeance against her, through Edward. “Listen, you, if this is you, I advise you very strongly—” and then she had hung up. What could he possibly do to her? She had nothing to fear, nor to regret, either. She had locked him out—what of it? It was not she who had robbed him of a proper home and a proper family; hardly. There was a debt that would never fully be paid, but it was not hers to him; hardly … Then one afternoon she was pushing Edward through Pendleton Park in his stroller, when a bum rose up off a bench and came lurching toward them. Quickly she had turned the stroller around and walked away, only to realize again in a matter of minutes that even if it was her father lying in wait for her, she had nothing to fear, nothing to regret. If he was a bum, begging and sleeping in the streets, it was not she who had put him there. He was not worth a moment of her thought, or of her pity.
In the summer after Edward’s third birthday Blanshard Muller began to become a regular caller at the house. Mullers had lived over on Hardy Terrace, back of the Bassarts’, in fact, for as long as Willard could remember. Blanshard lived alone there now, for his wife had died a tragic death three years back—Parkinson’s disease—and his children were all grown and away. The older son, Blanshard, Jr., was married and had a family of his own in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was already a junior executive in the purchasing department of the Rock Island Railroad; and Connie Muller, whom Lucy remembered as a big, beefy boy two years behind her in school, was finishing up in veterinary medicine at Michigan State.
Thirty years back Blanshard Muller had started out in business with a kit of tools and his two strong legs—Daddy Will’s description—and had gone around to offices all over the county, repairing typewriters. Today he rented, sold and serviced just about every kind of office machine in existence, and was sole owner of the Alpha Business Machine Company, located right back of the courthouse in Winnisaw. In his early fifties, he was a tall man with iron-gray hair that he combed very flat, a ski nose and a manly jaw. When he removed his square rimless spectacles, which he did whenever he sat down to eat, he bore a strong resemblance to none other than Bob Hope. Which was a little ironical, Daddy Will said, because Mr. Muller himself did not have much of a sense of humor. But there was no doubt that he was a respectable, dependable and hard-working person; you only had to look at the record to know that. Berta had taken to him immediately, and even Willard was heard to say, as the months went by, that there was certainly a lot to admire in a fellow who didn’t just ramble on or talk your ear off, but said what he had to say and left it at that. Certainly when he did express himself on a subject—such as the modernization of mail-sorting through automation, which Willard had brought into the conversation one Sunday after dinner—his thinking was clear and to the point.
Christmas Eve, with Whitey gone now more than three years, Blanshard Muller asked Myra to divorce her husband on the grounds of desertion, and become his wife.
Lucy learned of the proposal the next morning when Roy called hi
s family, and then hers, to say that they would not be able to get up to Liberty Center for Christmas. That morning Edward had awakened with a high fever and a bad cough; that he was too sick to go up and celebrate the holiday with his adoring grandparents caused the child to cry and cry with disappointment—and this saddened her. But it was all that saddened her. She had every reason to suspect that on that day someone would have suggested that they all go on over to the Sowerbys’ after dinner, or that the Sowerbys come to the Bassarts’; and given the spirit of the holiday, what could she have said or done to prevent the reunion? Of course she knew that she could not keep Roy from his aunt and his uncle forever, but she also knew that once such a meeting took place, he would once again be open to the most pernicious kinds of advice, and she and Edward would again be in danger of being abused, or even abandoned. If only she could arm him against his uncle’s influence once and for all! But how?
When they finally got up to Liberty Center late in January —Edward’s bronchitis had lingered nearly three weeks—they found that Lucy’s mother hadn’t yet given Mr. Muller a definite answer to his proposal. By the New Year, Berta had about lost patience with her daughter, but Daddy Will had made it clear to her that Myra was forty-three years old and in no way to be pushed or pressured into an important decision such as remarriage. She would make it official when she was ready to. Anybody who had eyes could see she was edging up on saying yes with every day that passed. Twice a week now she drove over to Winnisaw to have lunch with Blanshard at the inn; and even on weekday nights she either went off with him to a movie, or to a social evening among his own circle of friends. In the middle of the month she had even helped him pick out new linoleum for his kitchen floor. The kitchen and bathroom had begun to be modernized years ago, but the job had never been completed because of Mrs. Muller’s illness and death. Myra told her family that helping him choose his linoleum was a favor she would have done for anyone who asked; they were not to interpret it as any kind of decision on her part to become his wife.
