When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  She charged off the sofa. “And no courage!” she cried. “And no determination! And no will of your own! If I didn’t tell you what to do, if I were to turn my back—if I didn’t every single rotten day of this rotten life … Oh, you’re not a man, and you never will be, and you don’t even care!” She was trying to hammer at his chest; first he pushed her hands down, then he protected himself with his forearms and elbows; then he just moved back, a step at a time.

  “Lucy, come on, now, please. We’re not alone—”

  But she pursued him. “You’re nothing! Less than nothing! Worse than nothing!”

  He grabbed her two fists. “Lucy. Get control. Stop, please.”

  “Get your hands off of me, Roy! Release me, Roy! Don’t you dare try to use your strength against me! Don’t you dare attempt violence!”

  “I’m not attempting anything!”

  “I am a woman! Release my hands!”

  He did. He was crying.

  “Oh,” she said, breathing hard, “how I despise you, Roy. Every word you speak, everything you do, or try to do, it’s awful. You’re nothing, and I will never forgive you—”

  He put his hands over his eyes and wept.

  “Never, never,” she said, “because you are beyond hope. Beyond endurance. You are beyond everything. You can’t be saved. You don’t even want to be.”

  “Lucy, Lucy, no, that’s not true.”

  “LaVoy,” she said disgustedly.

  “—What?”

  “LaVoy’s not the pansy, Roy. You are.”

  “No, oh no.”

  “Yes! You! Oh, go!” She dropped back onto the sofa. “Disappear. Leave me, leave me, just get out of my sight!”

  She cried then, with such intensity that she felt her organs would be torn loose. Sounds that seemed to originate not in her body but in the corners of her skull emerged from her nostrils and her mouth. She pressed her eyes so tightly shut that between her cheekbones and her brow there was just a thin slit through which the hot tears ran. It began to seem she would be unable to stop crying. And she didn’t care. What else was there to do?

  When she awoke the apartment was without light. She turned on the lamp. Who had turned it off?

  “Roy?”

  He had gone out.

  She rushed to Edward’s room.

  In the next moment she lost all sense of where she was. She could not get her mind to give her any information. I am a freshman.

  No!

  “Edward!”

  She ran to the kitchen and turned on the light; then she was in his bedroom again. She opened the closet, but he was not hiding there. She opened his dresser to see … to see what?

  He has taken him to a movie. But it was nine o’clock at night.

  He has taken him for something to eat.

  Back in the living room, she ran her hand over every surface: no note, no nothing. In Edward’s bedroom she dropped to her knees. “Boo!” But he was not beneath the bed.

  Of course! In the kitchen she dialed Hopkins’ studio. He is showing him where he works, showing him what a big strong man he is. Showing him the kind of studio he could have in his own house if only Mommy wasn’t such a terrible person. Well, she hoped—while the phone rang and rang—she hoped that he was also showing him where they were all supposed to live while their living and bed room became a business office, showing him what they were supposed to live on, too, while he waited for the customers to—

  There was no one at the studio.

  She searched the apartment again. What am I looking for? Then she telephoned Liberty Center. But the Bassarts were still at the Sowerbys’. The operator asked if she wished to place the call later, but she hung up without giving the Sowerbys’ number. Suppose it was a false alarm? Suppose he had only taken Edward for a hamburger, and the two of them returned just as Julian Sowerby picked up the phone?

  She would just wait for him to come back and explain himself. To disappear without leaving a note! To take an exhausted little child out into a snowstorm at nine o’clock at night! There were cold things in the refrigerator; there was soup on the shelves. Don’t tell me it was to get him something to eat, Roy. It was to frighten me. It was to …

  At ten-thirty Roy phoned to say that he had just arrived back in Liberty Center. She did not even wait for him to finish. She told him what he was to do. He said that Edward was fine—fine now, at any rate, but it had been one ghastly, horrible experience for him, and she ought to know it. She had to raise her voice to interrupt; once again, she made clear to him what he was to do, and instantly. But he just said she shouldn’t worry. He’d take care of everything at his end; maybe she ought to just worry about getting everything under control at her own. It was necessary now to shout at him to make him understand. He was to do what she told him. He said he knew all about that, but the point was what she had done in the car, and what she had done afterward, what she had screamed at him, all in earshot of a small defenseless child. When she shouted again, he said that it would take the U.S. Marines to get him to return any child to a place where, to be honest about it, he really couldn’t stand it one day longer, as long as she kept on being the way she was. He was, to repeat, not returning any three-and-a-half-year-old to live one day more with a person who—he was sorry, but he was going to have to say it—

  “Say what!”

  “Who he hates like poison, that’s what!”

  “Who hates who like poison, Roy?”

  No answer.

  “Who hates who like poison, Roy? You will not get away with that insinuation, I don’t care where you’re hiding! I demand you clarify what you just had the audacity to say to me—what you would never dare to say to my face, you crybaby! You coward! Who hates—”

  “Hates you!”

  “What? He loves me, you liar! You are lying! He loves me, and you return that child! Roy, do you hear me? Return my child!”

  “I told you, Lucy, what he told me—and I will not!”

  “I don’t believe you! Not for a single second do I believe—”

  “Well, you better! All the way up here, he cried his little heart out—”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “ ‘I hate Mommy, her face was all black.’ That’s how he cried to me, Lucy!”

  “You’re lying, Roy!”

  “Then why does he lock himself in the toilet? Why does he run away from his dinner every other night—”

  “He doesn’t!”

  “He did!”

  “Because of you!” she shouted. “Not doing your job!”

  “No, Lucy, because of you! Because of your screaming, hateful, bossy, hateful, heartless guts! Because he never wants to see your ugly, heartless face again, and neither do I! Never!”

  “Roy, you are my husband! You have responsibilities! You get into that car this instant—you start out right now—and whether you drive all night—”

  But at the other end, there was a click; the connection was broken. Either Roy had hung up, or someone had taken the phone away and hung up for him.

  2

  The last bus out of Fort Kean got her to Liberty Center just before one in the morning. The snow was barely drifting down, and there was no one to be seen on Broadway. She had to wait at the back of Van Harn’s for a taxi to take her up to The Grove.

  She used the time as she had used the hour of the dark trip north: rehearsing once again what she would say. What was demanded of her was now clear enough; the scene to be enacted became vague only when she had to imagine what she would do if Roy refused to drive her and Edward back to Fort Kean. To stay at Daddy Will’s till morning was out of the question. That assistance she could live without. When hadn’t she? Nor would she stay overnight with the Bassarts, though the chance that she would even be invited to was very slight indeed. Had her in-laws had even a grain of loyalty to her, the instant Roy arrived back in town they would have demanded some explanation of him; they were at the Sowerbys’, they could have gotten on the phone with her
themselves, they could have intervened in behalf of a mother and a child, even if the husband happened in this instance to be a son. There were principles to be honored, values to respect, that went beyond blood relationships; but apparently they had no more knowledge of what it meant to be human than did her own family. None of them had so much as raised a finger to stop Roy in this reckless, ridiculous adventure, not even the high-minded high school teacher himself. No, she could not be innocent, not where people like this were concerned: she knew perfectly well that when Roy pronounced himself unable to undertake a second trip to Fort Kean at one in the morning, his parents would join with the Sowerbys in supporting him. And she knew too, that if she allowed him to stay behind while she and Edward returned alone to Fort Kean, then he would never return to live with them again.

  And how she wished that she could permit that to be. Had he not proved to her that his soul was an abyss, not just of selfishness, of mindlessness, but of heartless cruelty too? Try as she would to believe him capable of a deeper devotion, deceive herself as she might by believing him to be “sweet” and “kind,” a good and gentle man, the truth about his character was now glaringly apparent. There was a point beyond which one could not go in believing in the potential for good in another human being, and after four nightmarish years she had finally reached it. With all her heart she wished that she and Edward might return to Fort Kean, leaving Roy behind. Let him return to Mommy and Daddy and Auntie and Uncle, to his milk and his cookies and his endless, hopeless, childish dreaming. If only it were a month ago—if only there were just herself and Edward, then Roy, for all she cared, could disappear forever. She was young and strong; she knew what work was, she knew the meaning of sacrifice and struggle, and was not afraid of either. In only a few months Edward could begin nursery school; she could get work then, in a store, in a restaurant, in a factory—wherever the pay was highest, it did not matter to her how strenuous was the labor itself. She would support herself and Edward, and Roy could go off and live in his parents’ house, sleeping till noon, opening “a studio” in the garage, clipping pictures from magazines, pasting them up in scrapbooks—he could flounder and fail however he liked, but without her and Edward suffering the ugly consequences. Yes, she would get work, she would earn what they needed, and cut that monster—for who but a monster could have said on the phone those terrible things he had said to her?—cut him out of their lives, forever.

  All this she would have done, and gladly too, had he revealed the depths of his viciousness as briefly as a month ago. But now such a severing was out of the question—for very shortly her job would be not to earn a living for a family, but to be a mother to a second child. There was not just herself and Edward to protect: there was a third life to consider too. Whatever her own feelings and desires, she saw no gain, but only endless hardship, in permitting this man to run out on a child in its infancy … So, though she had now been given every cause to loathe him; though she understood now the horrid extremes to which he would go to defend himself and humiliate her; though she would as soon open the door of the Sowerby house to learn that he was dead, for him to desert his family was out of the question. He had duties and obligations, and he was going to perform them, whether he liked them or not. He was not staying behind in that house, or anywhere in this town, and thereby unburdening himself of the pain there just happened to be in life. Who, after all, was Roy Bassart that he should feel no pain? Who was Roy Bassart that he should live a privileged existence? Who was Roy Bassart to be without responsibilities? This was not heaven. This was the world!

  There were no lights on in any of the houses at The Grove. The plow had been through already, and the taxi was able to make its way easily up the street. When they stopped in front of the Sowerbys’, she thought of telling the driver to wait; in a moment she would be out with her child … But that could not be. Hateful as he was to her, there were facts and circumstances she must not be blind to: she would never, never save herself at the expense of an unborn child.

  But there was no sign of the Hudson. Either he had pulled it in the Sowerby garage—or he was no longer there. He had fled further north! To Canada! Beyond the reaches of the law! He had stolen Edward! He had abandoned her!

  No! She closed her eyes to shut out the worst until the worst was known; she pressed the doorbell, heard its ring, and saw her father sitting in a cell in the Florida State Prison. He is sitting on a three-legged stool wearing a striped uniform. There is a number on his chest. His mouth is open and on his teeth, in lipstick, is written INNOCENT.

  The door was opened by Julian Sowerby.

  Instantly she remembered where she was and what exactly had to be done.

  “Julian, I am here for Roy and Edward. Where are they?”

  He was wearing a shiny blue robe over his pajamas. “Well. Lucy. Long time no see.”

  “I am here for a purpose, Julian. Is Roy hiding out with you or not? If he is with his parents, tell me please, and—”

  He placed a finger over his lips. “Shhh,” he whispered. “People are sleeping.”

  “I want to know, Julian—”

  “Shhh, shhh; it’s after one. Come on in, why don’t you?” He motioned for her to hurry through the door. “Brrrr. Must be ten below.”

  Was she to be let in without resistance? On the bus coming north she had prepared herself for the possibility of a scene right out on the doorstep. Instead she was following Julian quietly through the hall and into the living room. And why? Of course—because what Roy had done was so obviously outrageous that even the Sowerbys could no longer take his side. In her isolation she had exaggerated—not the seriousness of Roy’s act, but the seriousness with which even her enemies would accept his story. The person who had slammed down the phone earlier was only Roy himself; the chances were he hadn’t even had the nerve to make the call in the presence of a rational human being.

  To understand this came as a tremendous relief. In her entire life she had never retreated from a struggle that had to be, and she would not have retreated here; she would, if necessary, actually have hurled herself against Julian Sowerby in order to enter his house and reclaim her husband and her child. But how grateful she was to be able to follow calmly and quietly behind. It was the scene with her family earlier in the day that had caused her imagination to become so extreme, that had led her to prepare herself for the fiercest struggle of her life. But as it turned out, Roy had now been revealed in such a way that even the most hard-hearted and unthinking of his supporters had lost all sympathy.

  And was that not bound to happen? Eventually, must not the truth prevail? Oh, it had not been in vain then that she had sacrificed and struggled! Oh yes, of course! If you know you are in the right, if you do not weaken or falter, if despite everything thrown up against you, despite every hardship, every pain, you oppose what you know in your heart is wrong; if you harden yourself against the opinions of others, if you are willing to endure the loneliness of pursuing what is good in a world indifferent to good; if you struggle with every fiber of your body, even as others scorn you, hate you and fear you; if you push on and on and on, no matter how great the agony, how terrible the strain—then one day the truth will finally be known—

  “Sit down,” said Julian.

  “Julian,” she said evenly, “I don’t think I will. I think, without delay, really—”

  “Sit down, Lucy.” He was smiling, and pointing to a chair.

  “I’d rather not.” She spoke firmly.

  “But I don’t care what you would rather do. I am telling you what you are going to do. First thing is sit.”

  “I don’t need to rest, thank you.”

  “But you do, Cutie-Pie. You need a long, long rest.”

  She felt anger shoot through her. “I don’t know what you think you’re saying, Julian, and I don’t care. I did not come here at this hour, at the end of a grueling day, to sit—”

  “Oh, no?”

  “—and talk with you.”

 
She stopped. Of what use was talk? How she had deluded herself only the second before—how pathetic, how foolish, how innocent of her, to have a generous thought about a person such as this. They were no better than she’d thought; they were worse.

  “I’ve been sitting up for you, Lucy,” said Julian. “What do you think of that? I’ve been looking forward to this, actually, for a long time. I figured you’d be on that bus.”

  “There is no reason why you shouldn’t have expected me,” she said. “It’s what any mother would have done.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s you, all right. Well, sit down, Any Mother.”

  She did not move.

  “Well,” he said, “then I’ll sit.” He settled into a chair, all the time keeping an eye on her.

  She was suddenly confused. There were the stairs—why didn’t she just walk up them, and wake Roy? “Julian,” she said, “I would appreciate it if you would go upstairs and tell my husband that I am here and I want to see him. I have come all the way from Fort Kean, Julian, in the middle of the night, because of what he has done. But I am willing to be reasonable about this, if you are.”

  Julian took a loose cigarette out of the pocket of his robe and straightened it between two fingers. “You are, huh?” he said, and lit it.

  What a disgusting little man! Why did she say “if you are”—what had he to do with it? And why was he waiting up for her in his pajamas and robe? Was this all preparatory to making some indecent offer? Was he going to try to seduce her while his own wife, his own daughter—?

  But at the top of the stairs Irene appeared—and it was then that Lucy understood fully the monstrousness of what these people were planning to do.

  “Irene—” She had the sensation that she might fall backward. “Irene,” she said, and had to take a deep breath to go on, “will you please, since you are up there, awaken Roy? Please tell him that I have come all the way from Fort Kean. That I am here, please, for him and for Edward.”

  She did not have to look over at Julian to know his gaze was fixed upon her. “The snow has stopped,” she said, still to the woman at the top of the stairs, who was wearing a quilted robe over her nightgown. “So we will drive home. If he is too tired, then we will take a room somewhere for the night. But he is not staying here. Nor is Edward.”