by Philip Roth
At nine-thirty Roy dropped into a sofa in the downstairs living room of The Bastille. The corner in which Lucy had chosen to wait for him was the darkest in the room.
“And I haven’t eaten,” he said. “I haven’t even eaten!”
“I have some crackers in my room,” she whispered.
“They’re not going to treat me like this,” he said, glaring down his legs at the tips of his Army shoes. “I won’t sit by and listen to threats, I’ll tell you that.”
“… Do you want me to get the crackers?”
“That isn’t the point, Lucy! The point is, pushing me around! Thinking he could make me sit there! Just make me, you know? Well, I don’t need them that bad, I’ll tell you that. And I don’t want them either, not if they’re going to take this kind of attitude. What an attitude to take—to me! To somebody they’re supposed to care about!”
He got up and walked to the window. Looking out at the quiet street, he banged a fist into his palm. “Boy!” she heard him say.
She remained curled up on the sofa, her legs back under her skirt. It was a posture she had seen the other girls take while talking to their boy friends in the dormitory living room. If the house mother came into the living room, it would seem as though nothing unusual were going on. So far no one in the dorm knew anything; no one was going to, either. In her two and a half months at school Roy hadn’t left her alone enough to make any close friends, and even those few girls she had begun to be friendly with on the floor, she had drawn away from now.
“Look,” said Roy, coming back to the sofa, “I’ve got the G.I. Bill, haven’t I?”
“Yes.”
“And I’ve got savings still, right? Other guys played cards, other guys shot crap—but I didn’t. I was waiting to get out. So I saved! Purposely. And they should know that! I told them, in fact—but they don’t even listen. And if worst ever came to worst, I’d sell the Hudson, too, even with all the work I put in it. Do you believe me, Lucy? Because it’s true!”
“Yes.”
Was this Roy? Was this Lucy? Was this them together?
“But they think money is everything. Do you know what he is, my Uncle Julian? Maybe I’m just finding out—but he’s a materialist. And what a vocabulary! It’s worse than you even think it is. What respect for somebody else!”
“What did he say? Roy, what kind of threats?”
“Oh, who cares. Money threats. And my father—him too. You know, by and large, whether he knew it or not, I used to respect him. But do you think he has any emotional respect for me, either? He’s trying to treat me like I’m in his printing class again. But I just got out of serving my time in the Army. Sixteen months in the Aleutian Islands—the backside of the whole goddamn world. But my uncle says—you know what he says? ‘But the war was over, buster, in 1945. Don’t act like you fought it.’ See, he fought it. He won a medal. And what’s that have to do with anything anyway? Nothing! Oh—up his.”
“Roy,” warned Lucy, as some senior girls came into the living room.
“Well,” he said, plopping down next to her, “they’re always telling me I should speak up for myself, right? ‘Make a decision and stick to it, Roy.’ Isn’t that all I heard since the day I got home? Isn’t my Uncle Julian always shooting off about how you have to be a go-getter in this world? That’s his big defense of capitalism, you know. It makes a man out of you, instead of just hanging around waiting for things to come your way. But what does he know about Socialism anyway? You think the man has ever read a book about it in his life? He thinks Socialism is Communism, and what you say doesn’t make any difference at all. None! Well, I’m young. And I’ve got my health. And I sure don’t care one way or the other about ever being in the El-ene washing-machine business, I’ll tell you that much. Big threat that is. I’m going to photography school anyway. And you know something else? He doesn’t know right from wrong. That’s the real pay-off. That in this country, where people are still struggling, or unemployed, or don’t have the ordinary necessities that they give the people in just about any Scandinavian country you can name—that a man like that, without the slightest code of decency, can just bully his way, and the hell with right and wrong or somebody’s feelings. Well, I’m through being somebody he can toss his favors to. Let him keep his big fourteen-dollar cigars. Up his, Lucy—really.”
The next morning, when the alarm rang at six-thirty, she went off to the bathroom to stick a finger down her throat before the other girls started coming in to brush their teeth. This made her feel herself again, provided she skipped breakfast afterward, and avoided the corridor back of the dining hall, and forced soda crackers down herself from time to time during the morning. Then she could get through the day’s classes pretending that she was the same girl in the same body, and in the same way too—alone.
But what about last night? And the night before that? The fainting spells had stopped two weeks back, and the nausea she could starve to death every morning, but now that Roy’s body seemed to be inhabited by some new person, the truth came in upon her as it never had before: a new person was inhabiting hers as well.
She was stunned. Her predicament was real It was no plot she had invented to bring them all to their senses. It was no scheme to force them to treat her like flesh and blood, like a human being, like a girl. And it was not going to disappear either, just because somebody besides herself was at long last taking it seriously. It was real! Something was happening which she was helpless to stop! Something was growing inside her body, and without her permission!
And I don’t want to marry him.
The sun wasn’t even above the trees as she ran across Pendleton Park to downtown Fort Kean.
She had to wait an hour in the station for the first bus to the north. Her books were in her lap; she had some idea that she could study on the way up and be back for her two-thirty, but then she had not yet a clear idea of why she was suddenly rushing up to Liberty Center, or what would happen there. On the bench in the empty station she tried to calm herself by reading the English assignment she had planned to do in her free hour before lunch, and during lunch, which she didn’t eat anyway. “Here you will have a chance to examine, and then practice, several skills used in writing effective sentences. The skills presented are those—”
She didn’t want to marry him! He was the last person in the world she would ever want to marry!
She began gagging only a little way beyond Fort Kean. When he heard the sounds of her distress, the driver pulled to the side of the road. She dropped out the back door and threw her soiled handkerchief into a puddle. Aboard again, she sat in the rear corner praying that she would not be ill, or faint, or begin to sob. She must not think of food; she must not even think of the crackers she had forgotten in her flight from the dorm; she must not think of what she was going to say, or to whom.
What was she going to say?
“Here you will have a chance to examine, and then practice, several skills used in writing effective sentences. The skills presented are those used by writers of the models in the Description Section—” Years ago there was a farm girl at L.C. High who took so large a dose of castor oil to try to make the baby come out that she blew a hole in her stomach. She contracted a terrible case of peritonitis, and lost the baby, but afterward, because she had come so close to dying, everyone forgave her, and kids who hadn’t even noticed her before—“Here you will have a chance to examine, and then practice, several skills used in writing—” Curt Bonham, the basketball star. He had been a year ahead of her. In March of his last term he and a friend had tried to walk home across the river one night while the ice was breaking up, and Curt had drowned. His whole class voted unanimously to dedicate the yearbook to him, and his graduation photograph appeared all by itself on the opening page of The Liberty Bell. And beneath the black-bordered picture was written—
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay …
ELLIOT CURTIS BONHAM
1930–1948
“What is it?” her mother asked when she came through the front door. “Lucy, what are you doing here? What’s the matter?”
“I got here by bus, Mother. That’s how people get from Fort Kean to Liberty Center. Bus.”
“But what is it? Lucy, you’re so pale.”
“Is anyone else home?” she asked.
Her mother shook her head. She had come running from the kitchen, carrying a small bowl in her hand; now she had it thrust up to her chest. “Dear, your coloring—”
“Where is everyone?”
“Daddy Will took Grandma over to the market in Winnisaw.”
“And he went to work? Your husband?”
“Lucy, what is it? Why aren’t you in school?”
“I’m getting married Christmas Day,” she said, moving into the parlor.
Sadly her mother spoke. “We heard. We know.”
“How did you hear?”
“Lucy, weren’t you going to tell us?”
“We only decided Monday night.”
“But, dear,” said her mother, “today is Friday.”
“How did you hear, Mother?”
“… Lloyd Bassart spoke to Daddy.”
“Daddy Will?”
“To your father.”
“Oh? And what came of that, may I ask?”
“Well, he took your side. Well, that’s what came of it. Lucy, I’m answering your question. He took your side and without a moment’s hesitation. Despite our not having been properly told by our own daughter, the day of her own wedding—”
“What did he say, Mother? Exactly.”
“He told Mr. Bassart he couldn’t speak for Roy, of course … He told Mr. Bassart we feel you are mature enough to know your own mind.”
“Well—maybe I’m not!”
“Lucy, you can’t think everything he does is wrong just because he does it. He believes in you.”
“Tell him not to, then!”
“Dear—”
“I’m going to have a baby, Mother! So please tell him not to!”
“Lucy—you are?”
“Of course I am! I’m going to have a baby and I hate Roy and I never want to marry him or see him again!”
She ran off to the kitchen just in time to be sick in the sink.
She was put to bed in her room. “Here you will have a chance …” The book slid off the bed onto the floor. What was there to do now but wait?
The mail fell through the slot in the hallway and onto the welcome mat. The vacuum cleaner started up. The car pulled into the driveway. She heard her grandmother’s voice down on the front porch. She slept.
Her mother brought her tea and toast. “I told Grandma it was the grippe,” she whispered to her daughter. “Is that all right?”
Would her grandmother believe that she had come home because of the grippe? Where was Daddy Will? What had she told him?
“He didn’t even come inside, Lucy. He’ll be back this afternoon.”
“Does he know I’m home?”
“Not yet.”
Home. But why not? For years they had complained that she acted contemptuous of everything they said or did; for years they complained that she refused to let them give her a single word of advice; she lived among them like a stranger, like an enemy even, unfriendly, uncommunicative, nearly unapproachable. Well, could they say she was behaving like their enemy today? She had come home. So what were they going to do?
Alone, she drank some of the tea. She sank back into the pillow her mother had fluffed up for her and drew one finger lightly round and round her lips. Lemon. It smelled so nice. Forget everything else. Just wait. Time will pass. Eventually something will have to be done.
She fell asleep with her face on her fingers.
Her grandmother came up the stairs carrying a wet mustard plaster. The patient let her nightgown be unbuttoned. “That’ll loosen it up,” said Grandma Berta, pressing it down. “The two important things, rest and heat. Plenty of heat. Much as you can possibly stand,” and she piled two blankets more onto the patient.
Lucy closed her eyes. Why hadn’t she done this at the start? Just gotten into bed and left it all to them. Wasn’t that what they were always wanting to be, her family?
She was awakened by the piano. The students had begun to arrive for their lessons. She thought, “But I don’t have the grippe!” But then she drove the thought, and the panic that accompanied it, right from her mind.
It must have begun snowing while she was asleep. She pulled a blanket off the bed, wrapped it around her, and at the window, put her mouth on the cold glass and watched the cars sliding down the street. The window began to grow warm where her mouth was pressed against it. Breathing in and out, she could make the circle of steam on the glass expand and contract. She watched the snow fall.
What would happen when her grandmother found out what really was wrong with her? And her grandfather, when he got home? And her father!
She had forgotten to tell her mother not to tell him. Maybe she wouldn’t. But then would anything happen?
She scuffed with her slippers across the old worn rug and got back into her bed. She thought about picking up her English book from the floor to work a little on those sentences; instead she got way down under the blankets and with her faintly lemony fingers under her nose, slept for the sixth or seventh time.
Beyond the window it was dark, though from where she sat propped up in the bed the snow could be seen floating down through the light of the street lamp across the street. Her father knocked on her door. He asked if he could come in.
“… It’s not locked” was her response.
“Well,” he said, stepping into the room, “so this is how the rich spend their days. Not bad.”
She could tell that his words had been prepared. She did not look up from the blanket, but began to smooth it out with her hand. “I have the grippe.”
“Smells to me,” he said, “like you’ve been eating hot dogs.”
She did not smile or speak.
“I tell you what it smells like. Smells like Comiskey Park, down in Chicago.”
“Mustard plaster,” she finally said.
“Well,” he said, giving the door a push so that it closed, “that’s one of your grandmother’s real pleasures in life. That’s one,” he said, lowering his voice, “and the other is … No, I think that about covers it.”
She only shrugged, as though she had no opinions on people’s habits, one way or the other. Was he clowning because he knew, or because he didn’t know? She saw from the corner of her eye that the pale hairs on the back of his hands were wet. He had washed before coming into her room.
The smell of dinner cooking down below caused her to begin to feel ill.
“Mind if I sit at the foot here?” he said.
“If you want to.”
She mustn’t be sick, not again. She mustn’t arouse in him a single suspicion. No, she did not want him to know, ever!
“Let’s see,” he was saying. “Do I want to or don’t I want to? I want to.”
She yawned as he sat.
“Well,” he said, “nice and cozy up here.”
She stared straight ahead into the snowy evening.
“Winter’s coming in with a rush this time,” he said.
She glanced quickly over at him. “I suppose.”
By looking instantly out the window, she was able to collect herself; she could not remember the last time she had looked directly into his eyes.
“Did I ever tell you,” he said, “about the time I sprained my ankle when I was working over at McConnell’s? It swelled way up and I came home, and your grandmother just lit up all over. Hot compresses, she said. So I sat down in the kitchen and rolled up my trouser leg. You should have seen her boiling up the water on the stove. Somehow it reminded me of all those cannibals over in Africa. She can’t see how it can be good for you unless it hurts or smells bad.”
Suppose she just blurted o
ut the truth, to him?
“A lot of people like that,” he said … “So,” and gave her foot a squeeze where it stuck up at the end of the bed, “how’s school going, Goosie?”
“All right.”
“I hear you’re learning French. Parlez-vous?”
“French is one of my subjects, yes.”
“And, let’s see … what else? You and me haven’t had a good conversation in a long time now, have we?”
She did not answer.
“Oh, and how’s Roy doing?”
Instantly she said, “Fine.”
Her father took his hand off her foot at last. “Well,” he said, “we heard, you know, about the wedding.”
“Where’s Daddy Will?” she asked.
“I’m talking to you right now, Lucy. What do you want him for while I’m talking to you?”
“I didn’t say I wanted him. I only asked where he was.”
“Out,” her father said.
“Isn’t he even going to have dinner?”
“He went out!” He rose from the bed. “I don’t ask where he goes, or when he eats. How do I know where he is? He’s out!” And he left the room.
In a matter of seconds her mother appeared.
“What happened now?”
“I asked where Daddy Will is, that’s all,” Lucy answered. “What’s wrong with that?”
“But is Daddy Will your father or is your father your father?”
“But you told him!” she burst out.
“Lucy, your voice,” said her mother, shutting the door.
“But you did. You told him! And I didn’t say you should!”
“Lucy, you came home, dear; you said—”
“I don’t want him to know! It’s not his business!”
“Now stop, Lucy—unless you want others to know too.”
“But I don’t care who knows! I’m not ashamed! And don’t start crying, Mother!”
“Then let him talk to you, please. He wants to.”
“Oh, does he?”
“Lucy, you have to listen to him. You have to give him a chance.”
She turned and hid her face in the pillow. “I didn’t want him to know, Mother.”