When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  However, the very next night, when Blanshard had to be at home interviewing a new salesman, she had paced and paced the living room, and after an hour of anguish, gone off into the kitchen and telephoned his house. It was really none of her business, she did not want him to think that she was in any way criticizing the woman who had been his wife, but she could not keep it inside her any more. She had to tell him how much she disapproved of the color scheme that had been chosen for the upstairs bathroom; if it was not too late to cancel the cabinets and fixtures he had gone ahead and ordered, she hoped very much that he would. She would understand, of course, if he didn’t wish to, for reasons of sentiment, but of course that wasn’t what he said.

  So the cat appeared to be in the bag, so to speak. Except that if Berta kept on endlessly chronicling Blanshard’s accomplishments and virtues, she might find that single-handed she had gained just the opposite effect of what she had intended. Maybe the best thing was to let Blanshard Muller argue his own case, and let Myra herself decide whether she wanted to start out on a new life with such a man. It was surely no solution to anything to hold a shotgun to someone’s head until the person said “I do”; you cannot force people to be what it simply is not within their power to be, or to feel feelings that they just do not have in their repertoire of tricks. “Ain’t that so, Lucy?” he asked, figuring probably that she would ally herself with him as against Berta, but she pretended not to have been following the discussion.

  It was a most dismal afternoon. Not only because she had to listen to her grandfather spouting the weak-kneed philosophy that had brought them practically to the point of ruin—the philosophy that encouraged people to believe that they couldn’t be more than they were, no matter how inferior and inadequate that happened to be; it was dismal not only because what her grandfather seemed to want was to keep his daughter living in his house as long as he possibly could, and what her grandmother seemed to want was to shove her out into the street, man or no man, within the hour; it was dismal because she discovered that she herself did not really seem to care whether her mother married Blanshard Muller or not. And yet it was what she had prayed for all her life—that a man stern, serious, strong and prudent would be the husband of her mother, and the father to herself.

  They drove to Fort Kean through a blizzard that evening. Roy was silent as he navigated slowly along the highway, and Edward fell asleep against her. Bundled in her coat, she watched the snow blowing across the hood and thought, yes, her mother was on the brink of marrying that good man her daughter had always dreamed of, and her own husband had stopped trying to evade his every duty and obligation. He had settled at last into the daily business, whether he liked it or not, of being a father and a husband and a man: her child had two parents to protect him, two parents each doing his job, and it was she alone who had made all this come about. This battle, too, she had fought and this battle, too, she had won, and yet it seemed that she had never in her life been miserable in the way that she was miserable now. Yes, all that she had wanted had come to be, but the illusion she had, as they drove home through the storm, was that she was never going to die—she was going to live forever in this new world she had made, and never die, and never have the chance not just to be right, but to be happy.

  It snowed and snowed that winter, but almost always after dark. The days were sharp with cold and brilliant with white light. Edward had a blue snowsuit with a hood, and little red mittens, and new red galoshes, and when she had finished straightening up the apartment, she would dress him in his bright winter clothes and take him with her as she pulled the shopping cart to the market. He would walk along beside her, planting each red galosh into the fresh snow and then pulling it out, always with great care and concentration. After lunch and his nap, they would go around to Pendleton Park with his sled. She would draw him around the paths and down a gentle little slope on the empty golf course. More and more they took the long way home, around by the pond where the schoolchildren were dashing about on skates, and out of the park by the women’s college.

  Her classmates had graduated the previous June. Probably that explained why she could now walk casually around by the campus that she had purposely avoided all these years. As for her teachers, she doubted if any of them would even remember her; she had come and gone too fast. Oh, but it was strange, very strange, to be pulling Edward on his sled past The Bastille. She wanted to tell him about the months that she had lived there. She wanted to tell him that he had lived there too. “The two of us—in that building. And no one would help, no one at all.”

  Since her student days, the barracks had been torn down and replaced by a long modernistic brick building that housed the classrooms, and now a new library was being built back of The Bastille. She wondered where the student health service was located these days; she wondered if that same cowardly doctor was still employed by the college. She would not have minded if he were to cross her path some afternoon and recognize her with her child. She believed there might be some satisfaction for her in that.

  Some afternoons she and Edward warmed themselves over a hot chocolate in the very same booth at the back of The Old Campus Coffee Shop where she had used to eat her lunch during the last months of her pregnancy. In the mirror beside the booth she saw the two of them, their noses red, their pale strawlike hair hanging into their eyes, and the eyes themselves, exactly the same. How far the two of them had come since those horrible days in The Bastille! Here, at her side, was the little boy she had refused to destroy—the little boy she now refused to see deprived! “Thank you, Mamma,” he said, as he solemnly watched her spoon the marshmallow from the top of her hot chocolate onto his, and she thought, “Here he is. I saved his life. I did it—all alone. Oh, why should I feel such misery? Why is my life like this?”

  The icicles they had passed when they had come out into the sunshine earlier on had lengthened by dusk. Every day Edward broke off the longest icicle he could find and held it carefully in his mittens until, at home, he would put it into the refrigerator for his Daddy to see when he returned from work. He was truly an adorable child, and he was hers, indisputably hers, brought into the world by her and protected in it by her too: nevertheless she felt herself doomed forever to a cruel and miserable life.

  For Valentine’s Day, Roy brought home two heart-shaped boxes of candy, a big one from him, a smaller one “from Edward.” After the little boy’s bath, Roy took a picture of him, with his hair combed, and in his bathrobe and slippers, presenting Lucy with her gift a second time.

  “Smile, kiddies.”

  “Take the picture, Roy, please.”

  “But if you’re not even smiling—”

  “Roy, I’m tired. Please take it.”

  After Edward was in bed, Roy sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and some Hydrox cookies and one of his manila folders. He began to look through all the pictures he had taken of Edward since he was born. “You want to hear an idea I had today?” He came into the living room, wiping his mouth. “It’s just an idea, you know. I mean I’m not serious about it, really.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, sort of getting all the pictures of Eddie, putting them in chronological order according to his age, and giving it a name. You know, it’s probably just a silly idea, but I’ve got the pictures for it, I can tell you that much.”

  “What is it, Roy?”

  “Well, a book. Kind of a story in photographs. Don’t you think that could be a good idea, if somebody wanted to do it? Call it ‘The Growth of a Child.’ Or ‘The Miracle of a Child.’ I wrote out a whole list of possible titles.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, during lunch. They sort of started coming at me … so I wrote them down. Want to hear?”

  She got up and went into the bathroom. Into the mirror she said, “Twenty-two. I am only twenty-two.”

  When she came back into the living room the radio was playing.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

>   “Fine.”

  “Aren’t you all right, Lucy?”

  “I’m feeling fine.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean I’m going to publish a book even if I could.”

  “If you want to publish a book, Roy, publish a book!”

  “Well, I won’t! I was just having some fun. Jee—zuz.” He picked up one of his family’s old copies of Life and began leafing through it. He slumped into his chair, threw back his head and said, “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “The radio. Hear that? ‘It Might As Well Be Spring.’ You know who that was my song with? Bev Collison. Boy. Skinny Bev. I wonder whatever happened to her.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Who said you’d know? I was only reminded of her by the song. Well, what’s wrong with that?” he asked. “Boy, this is really some Valentine’s Day night!”

  A little later he pulled open the sofa, and they laid out the blanket and pillows. When the lights were off and they were in bed, he said that she had been looking tired, and probably she would feel better in the morning. He said he understood.

  Understood what? Feel better why?

  From the bed they could see the snow falling past the street lamp outside. Roy lay with his hands behind his head. After a while he asked if she was awake too. It was so calm and beautiful outside that he couldn’t even sleep. Was she all right? Yes. Was she feeling better? Yes. Was there anything the matter? No.

  He got up and stood for a while looking outside. He carefully drew a big letter B in the frost on the window. Then he came and stood over the bed.

  “Feel,” he said, putting his fingertips to her forehead. “What a winter. I’m telling you, this is just what it was like up there.”

  “Where?”

  “The Aleutians. But at four in the afternoon. Can you imagine?”

  He sat beside her and put one hand on her hair. “You’re not angry at me about the book, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Because of course I’m not even going to do it, Lucy. I mean, how could I?”

  He got back under the blankets. Half an hour must have passed. “I can’t sleep. Can you?”

  “What?”

  “Can you sleep?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Well, is anything the matter?”

  She did not answer.

  “You want something? You want a glass of milk?”

  “No.”

  He made his way across the dark living room into the kitchen.

  When he returned he sat in the chair near the bed. “Want a Hydrox?” he asked.

  “No.”

  A car went ticking through the snowy street.

  “Wow,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  He asked if she was still awake.

  She did not answer. “Twenty-two,” she was thinking, “and this will be my whole life. This. This. This. This.”

  He went into Edward’s room. When he came back, he said that Edward was sleeping like a charm. That was the great thing about kids. Lights out, and they’re off in dreamland before you can count to three.

  Silence.

  Boy, wouldn’t it be something if some day they had a little girl of their own.

  A what?

  “A little girl,” he said.

  He got up and went into the kitchen and came back with the milk carton in his hand. He poured all that remained into his glass and drank it down.

  As long as he could remember, he said, he had dreamed of having a little daughter. Did she know that? And he had always known what he would call her, too. Linda. He assured Lucy that he had come upon the name long before the song “Linda” had gotten popular. Still, whenever he used to hear Buddy Clark singing it on the jukebox, back in the PX up in the Aleutians, he used to think about being married and having a family, and about this little daughter he would have some day who would be called Linda Bassart. Linda Sue. “Isn’t that pretty? I mean, forget the song. Isn’t it, just for itself? And it goes with Bassart. Try it … You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Linda—Sue—Bassart,” he said. “I mean, it’s not too fancy, on the one hand, and yet it’s not too plain either. Edward, too, is sort of right in the middle there, which is what I like.”

  Another car. Silence.

  He got up and looked out of the window. “Miss Linda … Sue … Bassart. Pretty good, ’eh what?”

  … Till that moment, to make him a proper father to his little boy had been so great a struggle that she had never once thought of a second child. But in that deep winter silence, listening to what he had said, and to the tone in which he said it, she thought that maybe at long last he wasn’t mouthing words for the sole purpose of pleasing her. He seemed not to be pretending; she could hear it in his voice, that he was expressing a real feeling, a real desire. Maybe he really did want a daughter. Maybe he always had.

  The whole next day she could not put out of her mind what Roy had said to her the previous night. It was all she could think of.

  When he came home in the evening, when, as usual, he swung Edward up over his head, she thought, “He wants a daughter. He wants a second child. Can it be? Has he actually changed? Has he finally turned into a man?”

  And so it was that in the early hours of the following morning, when Roy came rolling over on top of her, Lucy decided it was no longer necessary to continue to use protection. After Edward was born, the obstetrician had suggested that she might want to be fitted for a contraceptive device, if she did not already have one. Instantly she had said yes, when she understood that henceforth their fate would no longer be in Roy’s hands; never again would she be the victim of his incompetence and stupidity. But now he had told her that to have a daughter was one of his oldest desires. And though it had not sounded as though he had simply been trying to please her with his words, how would she ever know unless she gave him the chance to prove himself sincere and truthful?

  In the next few weeks Roy did not mention Linda Sue again, nor did she. In the dead of the night, however, she would be awakened by a hand or a leg falling upon her; and then his long body working against her small frame—or, if he was not wholly conscious, against her nightgown. This was how their love was made that February, and there was nothing extraordinary about it; it was how it had been made for years. Only now, while he pushed and thrust against her in the dark, she looked beyond his shoulder at the snow steadily blowing down, knowing that very shortly she was going to be pregnant for the second time in her life. And it would be different this time; there would be no one they would have to plead with, or argue with, nor would they have to argue with each other. They were married now, and there were no families upon whom either of them was dependent in any way. This time it would be something that Roy himself had said he wanted. And this time, she just knew, the child would be a girl.

  Suddenly her illusion of an endlessly unhappy life just disappeared. All the heaviness and sadness and melancholy seemed to have been drawn out of her overnight. Could it be? A new Lucy? A new Roy? A new life? One afternoon, walking home with Edward’s mittened hand in hers, and the sled rasping behind them over the cleared walks, she began to sing the silly song that Daddy Will had taught her little boy.

  “ ‘Poor old Michael Finnegan,’ ” he said cautiously, as though nonplused she should even know it …

  “But Daddy Will told you, I used to sing when I was a child. I was a child once too. You know that.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of course. Everyone was a child once. Even Daddy Will!”

  He shrugged.

  “He grew whiskers on his chin-negan …”

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and then he began to smirk, and by the time they got to the house, he was singing with his Mamma—

  “Along came the wind and blew them in-negan,

  Poor old Michael Finnegan—begin-negan.”

  Really, she could not remember ever having been as happy as this in her entire life
. The sensation she began to have was that the awful past had finally fallen away, and that she was living suddenly in her own future. It seemed to her that great spans of time were passing as the month wore down to Washington’s Birthday, and then to that final Sunday when they drove Edward up to visit the grandparents and great-grandparents in Liberty Center.

  After dinner Roy went outside to take pictures of Edward helping his grandfather break up a slick patch of ice in front of the garage doors. Lucy could see the three of them in the driveway, Roy telling Lloyd where to stand so that the light and the shadows fell right, and Lloyd telling Roy that he was standing where he had to in order to get the job done, and Edward plunging his red galoshes into the drifts at the side of the drive. She stood at the sink watching the scene outside and intermittently listening to Alice Bassart’s stream of chatter; they were finishing the dinner dishes, Alice washing and Lucy drying.

  Ellie Sowerby was home for the weekend, and all Alice could seem to talk about was the trouble Irene was having with her daughter. Lucy wondered if the conversation was primarily intended to irritate her. She and her mother-in-law hardly had what could be called a warm and loving relationship; no girl who had taken Alice Bassart’s big boy out of the house could have been her pal to begin with, but recently there had come to be another grievance. Whatever the resentment felt toward Lucy because of the marriage itself, her refusal to have anything to do with Alice’s sister and brother-in-law had only made things worse. Not that Alice ever came right out with it; that was not her little way.

  But what difference did Alice Bassart make to her today? Or even the Sowerbys? They were all a part of that past that seemed to have dissolved away to nothing. That past and these people had no power over her any longer. She had made it through the month without her period. There was only the future to think about now.