When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

  And was this the reward to be paid that dignity? Was this how Julian Sowerby chose to express his respect and gratitude to a woman of such refinement and generosity? Because she happened to have to wear special elasticized stockings; because in her middle age she was tending toward heaviness; because her hair had begun to turn to gray, was that sufficient cause for such a person to be deceived, disgraced, discarded by a philandering loud-mouthed little pig of a man? Blondie! Cutie-Pie! What a person! What a disgusting cheat of a person!

  Yet in her heart she had always known. That was the amazing part.

  What should Ellie do? Tell her mother? Tell her Uncle Lloyd? Or should she speak directly to her father, so as to spare her mother from ever knowing? Yes, go to him; and if he promises to end his associations with his women, promises never to resume with them again … Or perhaps first she ought to find out who the woman was. And then go to her. Yes, and tell her that she must break off relations with her father instantly, or risk exposure—even incarceration, if it turned out (as it might) that she was a prostitute who sold her services to men like Julian Sowerby. Or perhaps Ellie should keep her secret, bide her time, wait for the phone to ring again—and then lift the extension and instead of burying the truth in her pillow, instead of simply sitting like a ninny enduring his treachery, put an end to it once and for all: “This is Eleanor Sowerby. I am Julian Sowerby’s daughter. I should like to know your name, please.”

  All at once, air colder and fresher than any they had felt in months seemed to descend on the Sowerbys and their young guests.

  “Wow,” said Joe softly. In his excitement he sat straight up. “It’s fall. It’s really fall.”

  “Hey, let’s get this Princess in the house,” said Julian Sowerby. He stood and stretched, so that his cigar went waving over his head like some signal.

  “Good idea,” said Joe. He and Roy told Mrs. Sowerby that since it was the maid’s night off, the two of them would carry in all the dirty dishes. They made a big fuss about not letting her touch anything, and shooed her directly into the house.

  Mr. Sowerby began to fold up the chairs, and Roy began to whistle “Autumn Leaves” as he went around collecting the silverware. Joe, piling plates, was saying to him, “Do you realize, Big Roy-boy, that tomorrow at this time—”

  Suddenly Ellie was at Lucy’s side, whispering into her ear.

  “What?” said Lucy.

  “… forget everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—never mind!”

  “But … didn’t it really happen?”

  “Hey, my two colleens,” Julian called, using an Irish accent. “Enough giggling now and into the house with you.”

  They started quickly across the lawn. Ellie shivered, pulled the afghan up over her hair, and started to run for the open door.

  Lucy hissed, “But, Ellie, what are you going to do?”

  Ellie stopped. “I’ll—I’ll—”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I’ll just go to Northwestern.”

  “But,” whispered Lucy, taking hold of her arm, “your mother?”

  But now Roy and Joe rushed up from behind—“Coming through! Hot stuff! Watch it, ladies!”—and anything further she said would have been overheard. And then Julian Sowerby suddenly had each of them by the arm, and, laughing, ran them into the house.

  The next day Joe left for Alabama, and then Ellie herself became desperately busy with shopping and packing, and was almost perpetually in the company of her mother—who still seemed to be innocent of what was happening behind her back. The few times they were together for more than a minute, Lucy hardly had a chance to open her mouth, before Ellie said, “Shhh, later,” or “Lucy, I think never mind, really,” and finally, “Look, I was all wrong.”

  “You were?”

  “I misunderstood, I’m sure, yes.”

  “But—”

  “Please, let me just get to college!”

  By the time they parted they seemed hardly even to be friends any longer, if they ever had been. Ellie and her family drove off to Evanston on the second weekend in September, and on the Monday following, on a day that Lucy had encircled with five black rings on her calendar, she and Roy drove down with a carful of luggage to begin their schooling in Fort Kean.

  3

  She passed out twice in the second week of November, first in a booth in The Old Campus Coffee Shop, and the afternoon following, upon rising from her seat at the end of English class. At the student health center, a barracks building that had been converted into the infirmary, she told the doctor that she believed she might be suffering from anemia. Her skin had always been on the pale side, and in winter the tips of her toes and fingers went white and icy when it got very cold.

  After the examination she dressed and sat in a chair the doctor had pulled back for her in his office. He said that he did not believe the problem was with the circulation in her extremities. Looking out the window, he asked if she had been having any trouble lately with her periods. She said no, then she said yes, and then, clutching her coat and her books in her arms, she rushed out the door. In the narrow corridor she felt herself spinning, but this time the sensation lasted only a second.

  As soon as she pulled shut the door of the phone booth in the coffee shop she realized that Roy would be in class. His landlady, Mrs. Blodgett, answered, and Lucy hung up without even speaking. She thought of dialing the school and having him called to a phone; but what would she say to him? The Strange sensation she began to have—as the first wave of confusion gave way to a second, even more severe—was that it did not have anything to do with him anyway. She found herself thinking like a child who does not know the facts of life, who thinks that pregnancy is something that a woman does to herself, or that simply happens to her if she wishes hard enough.

  In her room she looked at all the ridiculous markings on her calendar. Just the previous Saturday, after Roy had driven her back to the dormitory from the movies, she had drawn a thick black ring around Thanksgiving Day. Suddenly she felt dreadful; she went and stood with her mouth open over the toilet, but all she could cough up were some brownish strands of liquid. The dread remained.

  That evening she did not answer when the on-duty girl rapped on the door to her room and said that a Roy was on the phone.

  At eight in the morning, the other girls drifting down to the dining hall or running off to class, Lucy rushed back to the infirmary. She had to wait on a bench in the corridor until ten, when the doctor finally arrived.

  “I was here yesterday,” she said. “Lucy Nelson.”

  “Come in. Sit down.”

  Before she began to speak he came around to the door and pushed it shut all the way. When he returned to his desk, she told him that she did not want a baby.

  He pushed his chair back a little and crossed one leg over the other. That was all he did.

  “Doctor, I’m a freshman. A first-semester freshman.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’ve been working for years to go to college. At night. In a soda fountain. Up in Liberty Center. That’s where I’m from … And summers too—three whole summers. And I have a Living Aid Scholarship. If I hadn’t gotten in here I might not even have been able to go to school at all—because of money.” But she did not want to plead poverty, or even helplessness. What he had to know was that she was not weak, she was strong, she had undergone many hardships, and much suffering—she wasn’t just another eighteen-year-old girl. It wasn’t merely that she needed his help; she deserved it. “This is my first real experience away from home, Doctor. I’ve been waiting for it all my life. Saving for it. It’s all I’ve had to look forward to for years.”

  He continued to listen.

  “Doctor, I’m not promiscuous, I swear it. I’m just eighteen! You’ve got to believe me!”

  Until then the doctor had sat there with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. Now he adjusted the spectacles down onto the bridge of his nose.

>   “I don’t know what to do,” she said, trying to regain her self-control.

  His face remained immobile. He had soft gray hair and kind eyes, but he only scratched the side of his nose.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said again. “I really don’t.”

  He crossed his arms. He rocked a little in his chair.

  “Doctor, I never had a boy friend before. He was my first one. That’s the truth—it really is.”

  The doctor swung the chair around and looked out the window, toward “The Bastille,” as the girls called the main building. He had pushed his glasses up again, and now he began rubbing at his eyes. Maybe he had been out on an emergency all night and was tired. Maybe he was thinking of what to say. Maybe he wasn’t even listening. He came out to the school four mornings a week for two hours, so what did he care? He had a practice of his own to worry about; this was just so much extra cash. Maybe he was only letting time pass before he sent her away to deal with her own mess.

  He turned back to her. “And where is the young man?” he asked.

  “… Here.”

  “Speak up, Lucy. Where?”

  She felt herself becoming meek. Or was it protective? “In Fort Kean.”

  “And now that he’s had his fun, that’s it, I suppose.”

  “What?” she whispered.

  He was rubbing at his temples with the tips of his fingers. He was thinking. He was going to help! “Don’t you girls know what they’re up to?” he asked in a soft and unhappy voice. “Can’t you imagine what they’ll be like when something like this happens? A bright and pretty little girl like you, Lucy. What were you thinking about?”

  Her eyes welled with tears at the sound of her name. It might have been the first time she had ever heard it spoken. I’m Lucy. I’m bright. I’m pretty. Oh, her life was just beginning! So very much had happened to her in the last year alone—in the last month. Already there was a girl on her floor who knew a boy she wanted to fix Lucy up with. Only there had never once been an opportunity to meet him, what with Roy coming around every single night, if only to stop off and say hello. She was away from home at long long last—and starting to be pretty! Why, why had she gotten involved with him to begin with? Because he called her Angel? Because he took those pictures? Because he sang all those stupid songs into her ear? That big goon hadn’t the faintest idea what she was all about. All summer long he’d acted as though she were some kind of girl she wasn’t—as though she were some sort of Monkey Littlefield. And she had let him. She had let him have his stupid way! And now this! Only, this was what happened to farm girls, to girls who didn’t study, who quit school, who ran away from home. To Babs Egan, but not to her. Hadn’t enough happened to her already?

  “Doctor, I don’t know what I was thinking about.” She began to cry, despite herself. “All I mean is, lately I don’t even know what I’m doing sometimes.” She covered her face with her fingers.

  “And what about the boy?”

  “The boy?” she said helplessly, rubbing her tears away.

  “What does he plan to do about all this? Run off to the South Seas?”

  “Oh no,” she moaned, sadder than ever, “no, he’d marry me tomorrow,” and an instant too late she realized that she had said the wrong thing. It was the truth, but it was the wrong thing to have said.

  “But you don’t want to.” The doctor was speaking to her.

  She looked up from her lap, partly. “I didn’t say that.”

  “I have to have it straight, Lucy. Just as it is. He wants to, but you don’t want to.”

  She rose from her seat. “But I’m not even here three whole months! I’m a first-semester freshman!”

  He was moving his glasses up again. He had such a big, wrinkled, friendly face—you just knew he had a family he loved, and a nice house, and a calm and pleasant life. “If the young man wants to marry you—”

  “What of it? What if he does?”

  “Well, I think that’s something that must at least be taken into consideration. Don’t you?”

  Blankly she said, “I don’t understand.” And she didn’t.

  “His feelings are something that have to be taken into consideration. His love for you.”

  Dumbly she sat there shaking her head. He didn’t love her. He just sang those stupid songs into her ear.

  “—what he wants,” the doctor was saying, “what he expects, too.”

  “But he doesn’t know what he wants.”

  “You say he wants to marry you.”

  “Oh, that isn’t what I mean. He says things, but he doesn’t even know what! Doctor—please, you’re right, I don’t want to marry him. I don’t want to lie to you. I hate liars and I don’t lie, and that’s the truth! Please, hundreds and hundreds of girls do what I did. And they do it with all different people!”

  “Perhaps they shouldn’t.”

  “But I’m not bad!” She couldn’t help herself, it was the truth: “I’m good!”

  “Please, you must calm down. I didn’t say that you were bad. I’m sure you’re not. You mustn’t jump at everything I say before I finish saying it.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s a habit. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “They shouldn’t,” he began again, “because most of them aren’t old enough to pay the price if they lose. If they get into trouble.”

  “But—”

  “But,” his voice rose over hers, “they’re old enough to want the love. I know.”

  The tears moved again into her eyes. “You do understand. Because that’s what happened to me, just what you said. That’s exactly it.”

  “Lucy, listen to me—”

  “I am, Doctor. Because that is what happened—”

  “Lucy, you’re not alone in this.”

  At first she thought he meant that there were other girls in school in the same fix—perhaps even in the infirmary rooms along the corridor beyond his office.

  “There is a young man,” the doctor said.

  “But—”

  “Listen to me, Lucy. There is a young man, and there is your family. Have you spoken to your family about this yet?”

  She looked into her plaid skirt, where her fingers were clutched at the big safety pin.

  “You do have a family?”

  “Yes. I suppose.”

  “I think you have to forget your embarrassment and take this problem to your family.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a terrible family.”

  “Lucy, you’re not the first eighteen-year-old girl to think her family is terrible. Surely you’ve discovered that since you’ve been at school.”

  “But my family is terrible. I don’t think it—it’s true!”

  He said nothing.

  “I ignore them. I have nothing to do with them. They’re inferior, Doctor,” she added when he still didn’t seem to believe her.

  “In what way?”

  “My father drinks.” She looked him straight in the eye. “He’s a drunkard.”

  “I see,” he said. “And your mother?”

  Helplessly she was weeping again. “She’s too good for him.”

  “That doesn’t sound inferior,” the doctor said quietly.

  “Yes, but she should have left him years and years ago, if she had any sense. Any self-respect. She should have found a man who would be good to her and respect her.” Like you, she thought. If you had met my mother, if she had married you … She heard herself saying, “Some people think, someone said once, she looks like Jennifer Jones. The actress.”

  He handed her a tissue and she blew her nose. She mustn’t ask to be pitied; she mustn’t whimper; she mustn’t fall to pieces. That’s what her mother would do.

  “Lucy, I think you should go home. Today. Maybe she understands more than you imagine. Maybe she won’t be angry. I would think from what you say that she wouldn’t be.”

  She did not respond. He was trying to get out of it. That’s exactl
y what he was beginning to do.

  “You seem to love her. Probably she loves you too.”

  “But she can’t help, Doctor. Love has nothing to do with it. Love is what’s wrong with her. She’s so weak. She’s so insipid!”

  “My dear, because you’re upset now—”

  “But, Doctor, they can’t help! Only you can help,” she said, standing. “You must!”

  He shook his head. “But I can’t, I’m afraid.”

  “But you have to!”

  “I’m terribly sorry.”

  Could he mean it? Could he understand the situation as he did, and then turn around and say he wasn’t going to help? “But this isn’t fair!” she cried.

  The doctor nodded his head. “It isn’t.”

  “So then what are you going to do about it? Sit there pushing your glasses up and down? Sit there being wise to me? Call me ‘my dear’!” Instantly she sat back down in her chair. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. But why are you …? I mean, you see what happened. You understand.” She felt now that she had to plead with him, to convince him that he was right. “You do understand, Doctor. Please, you’re an intelligent person!”