by Philip Roth
Or he could pretend not to hear everything; let on that he was getting a little deaf. Who’d know the difference? Yes, that might well be a way of solving the whole thing, without bringing a wheelchair into the bargain. Just look blank, shrug your shoulders and walk away. In the months to come he could pretend every once in a while to be slipping some with his faculties. Yes sir, just have to make their way without him. Welcome to use his house for a while, that was fine with him, but beyond that—well, he just wasn’t all there in the head, you know. Maybe to make his point so that it stuck, he ought to, on purpose to be sure, and knowing exactly what he was doing all the while, and not in Berta’s direction of course, do as his sad old friend John Erwin had begun unfortunately to do, and wet the bed.
“But why? Why should I be senile? Why be off my head when that is not the case!” He jumped to his feet. “Why be getting pneumonia and worrying myself sick—when all I did was good!” The fear of death, horrible, hateful death, caused him to bring his lids tight down over his eyes. “Good!” he cried. “Unto others!” And down the hill he went, shedding snow from his jacket and his cap, while his old, aching legs carried him as fast as they could out of the graveyard.
Not until he was past the cemetery road and under the street lamps of South Water Street did Willard’s heartbeat begin to resume something resembling a natural rhythm. Just because winter was beginning again did not mean that he was never going to see the spring. He was not only going to live till then, he was alive right now. And so was everybody shopping and driving in cars; problems or not, they are alive! Alive! We are all alive! Oh, what had he been doing in a cemetery? At this hour, in this weather! Come on, enough gloomy, morbid, unnecessary, last-minute thinking. There was plenty more to think about, and not all of it bad either. Just think how Whitey will laugh when he hears how in the middle of the night, as though in judgment of itself, the building that used to house Earl’s Dugout caved right in, roof first, and had to be demolished. And so what if Stanley’s is under new management? Whitey had as much disdain of a low-down saloon as anybody when he was being himself—and that was a good deal more often than it might appear, too, when you were purposely setting out to remember the low points in his life. You could do that with anybody, think only about their low points … And wait till he sees the new shopping center, wait till he takes his first walk down Broadway—sure, they could do that together, and Willard could point out to him how the Elks had been remodeled—
“Oh hell, the fellow is nearly fifty—what else can I even do?” He was speaking aloud now, as he drove on into town. “There is a job waiting for him over in Winnisaw. That has all been arranged, and with his say-so, with his wanting it, with his asking for it. As for the moving in, that is absolutely temporary. Believe me, I am too old for that other stuff. What we are planning is January the first … Oh, look,” he cried to the dead, “I am not God in heaven! I did not make the world! I cannot predict the future! Damn it anyway, he is her husband—that she loves, whether we like it or not!”
Instead of parking at the back of Van Harn’s, he pulled up in front so as to take the long way to the waiting room, so as to have just another thirty seconds of reflection. He entered the store, slamming his wet cap against his knee. “And most likely,” he thought, “most likely won’t be there anyway.” Without coming into the waiting room, he set himself to peer inside. “Most likely I have sat up there for no good reason at all. In the end he probably did not even have it in him to come back.”
And there was Whitey, sitting on a bench, looking down at his shoes. His hair was now quite gray; so was the mustache. He crossed and recrossed his legs, so that Willard saw the undersides of his shoes, pale and smooth. A little suitcase, also new, sat beside him on the floor.
“So,” said Willard to himself, “he did it. Actually got on a bus and came. After all that has happened, after all the misery he has caused, he has had the nerve to get on a bus and then get off it and to wait here half an hour, expecting to be picked up … Oh, you idiot!” he thought, and unseen yet, glared at his middle-aged son-in-law, his new shoes, his new suitcase—oh, sure, new man too! “You dumb cluck! You scheming, lying, thieving ignoramus! You weak, washed-out lushhead, sucking the life’s blood from every human heart there is! You no-good low-life weakling! So what if you can’t help it! So what if you don’t mean it—”
“—Duane,” said Willard, stepping forward, “How you doing, Duane?”
Two
1
When young Roy Bassart came out of the service in the summer of 1948, he didn’t know what to do with his future, so he sat around for six months listening to people talk about it. He would drop his long skinny frame into a big club chair in his uncle’s living room and instantly slide half out of it, so that his Army shoes and Army socks and khaki trousers were all obstacles to cross over if you wanted to go by, as his cousin Eleanor and her friend Lucy often did when he was visiting. He would sit there absolutely motionless, his thumbs hooked around the beltless loops of his trousers and his chin tipped down onto his long tubular chest, and when asked if he was listening to what was being said to him, he would nod his head without even raising his glance from his shirt buttons. Or sometimes, with his bright, fair face, with those blue eyes as clear as day, he would look up at whoever was advising him or questioning him, and see them through a frame that he made with his fingers.
In the Army, Roy had developed an interest in drawing, and profiles were his specialty. He was excellent on noses (the bigger the better), good on ears, good on hair, good on certain kinds of chins, and had bought a manual to teach himself the secret of drawing a mouth, which was his weak point. He had even begun to think that he ought to go ahead and try to become a professional artist. He realized it was no easy row to hoe, but maybe the time had come in life for him to tackle something hard instead of settling for the easiest thing at hand.
It was his plan to become a professional artist that he had announced upon his return to Liberty Center late in August; he had barely set down his duffel bag in the living room when the first argument began.
You would have thought he was a kid returning home from Camp Gitche Gumee instead of the Aleutian Islands. If he had forgotten in the time away what life had been like for him during his last year of high school, it did not take Lloyd and Alice Bassart more than half an hour to refresh his recollection. The argument, which went on for days, consisted for the most part of his parents saying they had had experiences he hadn’t, and Roy saying that now he had had experiences they hadn’t. After all, it just might be, he said, that his opinion counted for something—particularly since what they were discussing was his career.
To make a point, in fact, he spent the whole of his third day home copying a girl’s profile off a matchbook cover. He worked it over and over and over, taking just a quick break for lunch, and only after an entire afternoon behind the locked door of his bedroom did he believe he had gotten it right. He addressed three different envelopes after dinner, until he was satisfied with the lettering, and then sent the picture off to the art school, which was in Kansas City, Missouri—walking all the way downtown to the post office to be sure that it made the evening mail. When a return letter announced that Mr. Roy Basket had won a five-hundred-dollar correspondence course for only forty-nine fifty, he tended to agree with his Uncle Julian that it was some kind of clip joint, and did not pursue the matter any further.
Just the same, he had proved the point he had set out to prove, and right off. When he had been called up by the draft board for his two years’ service, his father had said that he hoped a little military discipline would do something toward maturing his son. He himself seemed willing to admit bungling the job. Well, the way things turned out, Roy had matured, and plenty, too. But it wasn’t discipline that had done it; it was, to put it bluntly, being away from them. In high school he may have been willing to slide through with C’s and C-minuses, when with a little application of his intelligence (Alice Bassart:
Which you have, Roy, in abundance), he could easily have had straight B’s—probably even A’s, if he had wanted them. But the point he wished to make was that he was no longer that C student, and no longer would be treated like him either. If he put his mind to a job he could do it, and do it well. The only problem now was which job it was going to be. At the age of twenty, nobody had to tell him that it was high time to begin thinking about becoming a man. Because he was thinking about it, and plenty, don’t worry.
He continued to work on his own out of the art manual, in exasperation moving on to the neck and the shoulders, after four days of going from bad to worse with the mouth. Though he by no means relinquished his first choice of being a professional artist, he was willing to meet his family halfway and at least listen to whatever suggestions they might have. He had to admit being tempted by Uncle Julian’s suggestion that he come to work for him and learn the laundromat business from the ground up. What was particularly appealing about the idea was that the people in the towns along the river would see him driving around in Julian’s pickup truck and think of him as some punk kid; and the ladies who managed the laundromats would think of him as the boss’s nephew, and suppose his life was just a bed of roses—when in actuality his real work would only begin at night, after everyone was asleep, and behind his bedroom door he stayed awake till dawn, perfecting his talent.
What wasn’t too appealing was the idea of using family as a crutch, and right at the outset. He couldn’t bear the thought of hearing for the rest of his life, “Of course, it was Julian gave him his start …” But of more significance was the damage that accepting something like this could do to his individuality. Not only would he never really respect himself if he just stepped into a job and rose solely on the basis of personal privilege, but how would he ever realize his own potential if he was going to be treated like one of those rich kids who were just coddled up the ladder of success their whole life long?
And there was Julian to consider. He said he was altogether serious about the offer, provided Roy really wanted to work the long hard hours he would demand of him. Well, the long hard hours didn’t bother him. A really vicious mess sergeant had once, just out of meanness, kept him on KP for seventeen consecutive hours scrubbing pots and pans, and after that experience Roy realized he could do just about anything. So once he had made up his mind about the direction his life was going to take, he had every intention—to throw Julian’s language right back at him—of working his balls into the ground.
But what if he went in with Julian, started taking a salary, and then decided to go off in September to the Art Institute in Chicago; or even to art school in New York, which was by no means impossible? He was giving his parents’ objection every consideration (whether they appreciated that or not), but if he finally did decide in favor of professional artist as a career, wouldn’t he have wasted not only his time, but Julian’s as well? Probably to his uncle, whose affection he valued, he would wind up seeming ungrateful—and maybe that would even be sort of true. Ingratitude was something he had to guard against in himself. Though he was sure his classmates at school and his buddies in the service thought of him as easygoing and generous—his first sergeant used to sometimes call him Steppin’ Fetchit—he had been told he had a tendency to be selfish. Not that everybody didn’t have one, of course, but certain people had a way of exaggerating things all out of proportion, and he just didn’t feel like giving an ounce of support to a suspicion about him which it was actually unfair for anybody (particularly a person’s own father) to hold in the first place.
Moreover, what he had a real taste for, following the monotony and tedium of the preceding months, was adventure, and you couldn’t really expect that the Laundromat business would be packed with thrills, or even particularly interesting, to be frank about it. As for the security angle, money really didn’t matter that much to him. He now had two thousand dollars in savings and separation pay, plus the G.I. Bill, and anyway he had no ambition to be a millionaire. That’s why, when his father told him that artists wind up living in garrets, Roy was able to say, “What’s so wrong with that? What do you think a garret is? It’s an attic. My own room used to be the attic, you know,” a fact Mr. Bassart couldn’t easily dispute.
What he had a taste for was adventure, something to test himself against, some way to discover just how much of an individual he really was. And if it wasn’t the life of an artist, maybe it was some kind of a job in a foreign country, where to the natives he would be a stranger to be judged only by what he did and said, and not by what they knew about him from before … But saying such things was often only another way of saying you wanted to be a child again. Aunt Irene made that point, and he was willing to admit to himself that she could be right. He was always willing to listen to what ideas his Aunt Irene had, because (1) she usually said what she had to say in private and wasn’t just talking to impress people (a tendency of Uncle Julian’s); (2) she didn’t butt in, or raise her voice, when you argued back or disagreed (his father’s courteous approach); and (3) she didn’t ever respond with sheer hysterics to some idea or other he had most likely thrown out just to hear how it sounded (as his mother had a habit of doing).
His mother and his Aunt Irene were sisters, but two people couldn’t have been more different in terms of calmness. For example, when he said that maybe what he ought to do was leave Liberty Center with a pack on his back and see what the rest of the country had to offer, before making any major choice he would later be stuck with, Aunt Irene registered some interest in the idea. All his mother could do was push the old panic button, as they used to say in the service. Instantly she started to tell him that he had just returned from two years away (which of course he didn’t know), and to tell him that he ought to make up his mind to go to the state university (and use that intelligence of his “as God meant you to use it, Roy”) and then finally to accuse him of not listening to a word she said.
But he was listening, all right; even sunk down in that big chair, he took in all her objections, more or less. Those she had raised previously a hundred times or more he felt he had the right to tune out on, but he got the drift of her remarks, more or less. She wanted him to be a good little boy and do what he was told; she wanted him to be just like everybody else. And really, right there—in his mother’s words and tone—was reason enough for him to be out of town by nightfall. Maybe that’s what he ought to do, just shove off and not look back-once he had made up his mind what part of the country he ought to see first. There was always a sack for him in Seattle, Washington, where his best Army buddy, Willoughby, lived (and Willoughby’s kid sister, whom Roy was supposed to be fixed up with). Another good buddy, Hendricks, lived in Texas; his father owned a ranch, where Roy could probably work for his grub if he ever ran short of loot. And then there was Boston. It was supposed to be beautiful in Boston. It was the most historic city in America. “I might just try Boston,” he thought, even as his mother went gaily on losing her senses. “Yes sir, I might just pick up and head East.”
But to be honest, he could use a few more months of easy living before starting in roughing it again, if that’s what he finally decided it was best for him to do. He had spent sixteen months in that black hole of Calcutta (as they called it), eight to five every day in that scintillating motor-pool office—and then those nights. If he ever saw another ping-pong ball in his life … and the weather! It made Liberty Center seem like a jungle in South America. Wind and snow and that big gray sky that was about as inspiring to look at as a washed blackboard. And that mud. And that chow! And that narrow, soggy, undersized son-of-a-bitching (really) excuse for a bed! Actually he owed it to himself not to go anywhere until he had caught up on all the rest he had probably lost on that g.d. bed—and gotten one or two of his taste buds back to functioning too. After an experience like that he surely couldn’t say he minded having breakfast served to him in a nice bright kitchen every morning, and having a room of his own again where everything didn’t
have to be squared away with a plumb bob, or taking as long as he wanted (or just needed) in the john, with the door closed and nobody else doing his business at either elbow. It felt all right, he could tell you, to eat a breakfast that wasn’t all dishwater and cardboard, and then to settle down in the living room with the Leader, and read it at your leisure, without somebody pulling the sports page right up out of your hands.
As for his mother chattering away at him nonstop from the kitchen, he wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t understand that why she was concerned for him was because he happened to be her son. She loved him. Simple. Sometimes when he finished with the paper he would come into the kitchen where she was working, and no matter what silly thing she was saying, put his arms around her and tell her what a good kid she was. Sometimes he’d even dance a few steps with her, singing some popular song into her ear. It didn’t cost him anything, and as far as she was concerned, it was seventh heaven.
She really meant well, his mother, even if some of her pampering ways were a little embarrassing at this stage of the game. Like sending him that package of toilet-seat liners. That’s what he had received at mail call one day: a hundred large white tissues, each in the shape of a doughnut, which she had seen advertised in a medical magazine at the doctor’s office, and which he was supposed to sit on—in the Army. At first he actually thought of showing them to his first sergeant, who had been wounded in the back at Anzio during World War II. But thinking that Sergeant Hickey might misunderstand, and instead of making fun of his mother, make fun of him, he had strolled around back of the mess hall late that night and furtively dumped them into a can of frozen garbage, careful first to remove and destroy the card she had enclosed. It read, “Roy, please use these. Not everyone is from a clean home.”