by Philip Roth
Her mother sat on the bed, and put her hand to the girl’s hair.
“And,” said Lucy, moving back, “what was he going to say, anyway? Why didn’t he just say it out, if he had anything to say?”
“Because,” her mother pleaded, “you didn’t give him the chance.”
“Well, I’m giving you a chance, Mother.” There was a silence. “Tell me!”
“Lucy … dear … what would you think … What would you say—what would you think, I mean—of going for a visit—”
“Oh, no.”
“Please let me finish. Of going to visit your father’s cousin Vera. In Florida.”
“And is that his idea of what to do with me?”
“Lucy, till this is over. For the little while it will take.”
“Nine months is no little while, Mother—”
“But it would be warm there, it would be pleasant—”
“Oh,” she said, beginning to cry into the pillow, “very pleasant. Why doesn’t he ship me off to a home for wayward girls, wouldn’t that be even easier?”
“Don’t say that. He doesn’t want to send you anywhere, you know that.”
“He wishes I’d never been born, Mother. He thinks I’m why everything is so wrong with him.”
“That’s not so.”
“Then,” she said, sobbing, “he’d have one less responsibility to feel guilty about. If he even felt guilty to begin with.”
“But he does, terribly.”
“Well, he should!” she said. “He is!”
Some twenty minutes after her mother had run from the room, Daddy Will knocked. He was wearing his lumber jacket and held his cap in his hands. The brim was dark where the snow had dampened it.
“Hey. I hear somebody’s been asking for me.”
“Hullo.”
“You sound like death warmed over, my friend. You ought to be outside and feel that wind. Then you’d really appreciate being sick in bed.”
She did not answer.
“Stomach settle down?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He pulled a chair over to the side of the bed. “How’s about another mustard plaster? Berta called me at the Erwins’ and on the way home I stopped and bought a whole fresh packet. So just say when.”
She turned and looked at the wall.
“What is it, Lucy? Maybe you want Dr. Eglund. That’s what I told Myra …” He pulled the chair right up close. “Lucy, I never saw anything like the change in him this time,” he said softly. “Not a drop—not a single solitary drop, honey. He is taking this whole decision of yours right in his stride. You set a date and it was just fine with him. Fine with all of us—whatever you think is going to make you and Roy happy.”
“I want my mother.”
“Don’t you feel good again? Maybe the doctor—”
“I want my mother! My mother—and not him!”
She was still looking at the wall when her door was opened.
“Myra,” her father said, “sit over there. Sit, I said.”
“Yes.”
“All right, Lucy. Turn over.” He was standing by the side of the bed. “Roll over, I said.”
“Lucy,” her mother begged, “look at us, please.”
“I don’t have to see that his shoes are shined and his jaw is set and what a new man he is. I don’t have to see his tie, or him!”
“Lucy—”
“Myra, be quiet. If she wants to act like a two-year-old at a time like this, let her.”
She whispered, “Look who’s talking about two-year-olds.”
“Listen, young lady. Your backtalk doesn’t faze me one way or the other. There have always been smart-aleck teen-agers and there always will be, especially this generation. You just listen to me, that’s all, and if you’re too ashamed to look me right in the eye—”
“Ashamed!” she cried, but she did not move.
“Are you or are you not going to visit Cousin Vera?”
“I don’t even know Cousin Vera.”
“That isn’t what I’m asking.”
“I can’t go off alone to someone I don’t even know—and what? Make up filthy lies for the neighbors—?”
“But they wouldn’t be lies,” said her mother.
“What would they be, Mother? The truth?”
“They would be stories,” her father said. “That you have a husband overseas, say, in the Army.”
“Oh, you know all about stories, I’m sure. But I tell the truth!”
“Then,” he said, “just what do you intend to do about getting in trouble with somebody who you say you can’t even stand?”
She turned violently from the wall, as though she intended to hurl herself at him. “Don’t you take such a tone with me. Don’t you dare!”
“I am not taking any tone!”
“Because I am not ashamed—not in front of you I’m not.”
“Now watch it, you, just watch it. Because I can still give you a licking, smart as you think you are.”
“Oh,” she said bitterly, “can you?”
“Yes!”
“Go ahead, then.”
“Oh, wonderful,” he said, and walked to the window where he stood as though looking outside. “Just wonderful.”
“Lucy,” said her mother, “if you don’t want to go to Cousin Vera’s, then what do you want to do? Just tell us.”
“You’re the parents. You were always dying to be the parents—”
“Now look,” said her father, turning to face her once again. “First, Myra, you sit down. And stay down. And you,” he said, waving a finger at his daughter, “you give me your attention, do you hear? Now there is a crisis here, do you understand that? There is a crisis here involving my daughter, and I am going to deal with it, and it’s going to be dealt with.”
“Fine,” said Lucy. “Deal.”
“Then be still,” her mother pleaded, “and let him talk, Lucy.” But when she made a move to sit on the bed, her husband looked at her and she retreated.
“Now either I’m going to do it,” he said to his wife, speaking between his teeth, “or I’m not. Now which is it?”
She lowered her eyes.
“Unless of course you want to call your Daddy in,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Now,” said her father, “if you wanted to marry that Roy Bassart—such as we understood you did, Lucy, till just today, and backed you up on all the way—that would be one thing. But this is something else entirely. Who he is I see pretty clear now, and the less said about him the better. I understand the whole picture, so there is just no need for raising voices. He was older, back from service, and just thought to himself he could come back here and take advantage of a young seventeen-year-old high school girl. And that’s what he did. But he is his father’s business, Lucy, and we will have to leave it to his high and mighty father, the big schoolteacher, to teach something into that boy’s hide. Oh, his father thinks he is very superior and all in his ways, but I guess he is going to have another guess coming now. But my concern is with you, Lucy, and what is uppermost to you. Do you understand that? My concern is your going to college, which has always been your dream, right? Now, the question is this, do you still want your dream, or don’t you?”
She did not favor him with a reply.
“Okay,” he said, “I am going to go ahead on my assumption that you do, just as you always did. Now, next—to give you your dream I am going to do anything I can … Are you listening to me? Anything that is going to give it to you, do you follow me? Because what that so-called ex-G.I. has done to you, which I would like to put my hands around his throat for, well, that is not going to just take away your dream, lock, stock and barrel … Now, anything,” he went on. “Even something that isn’t usual and ordinary, and that might to some folks seem very—out of the question.” He came closer to the bed so that he could speak without being heard outside the room. “Now do you know what anything means, before I go to the next step?�
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“Giving up whiskey?”
“I want you to go to college, it means! I have given up whiskey, for your information!”
“Really?” she asked. “Again?”
“Lucy, since Thanksgiving,” her mother began.
“Myra, you be still.”
“I was only telling her—”
“But I will tell her,” he said. “I will do the telling.”
“Yes,” his wife said softly.
“Now,” he said, turning back to Lucy. “Drink is neither here nor there. Drink is not the issue.”
“Oh no?”
“No! A baby is!”
And that made her look away.
“An illegitimate baby is,” he said again. “And if you don’t want that illegitimate baby”—his voice had fallen almost to a whisper now—“then maybe we will have to arrange that you don’t have it. If Cousin Vera’s is still something you are going to consider out of the question—”
“It absolutely is. I will not spend nine months lying. I will not get big and pregnant and lie!”
“Shhh!”
“Well, I won’t,” she muttered.
“Okay.” He wiped his mouth with his hand. “Okay.” She could see where the perspiration had formed above his lip and on his forehead. “Then let’s do this in order. And without voice-raising, as there are other people who live in this house.”
“We’re the other people who live here.”
“Be still!” he said. “Everybody knows that without your backtalk!”
“Then just what are you proposing to me? Say it!”
Her mother rushed to the bed at last. “Lucy,” she said, taking hold of her hand, “Lucy, it’s only to help you—”
And then her father took hold of the other hand, and it was as though some current were about to pass through the three of them. She closed her eyes, waited—and her father spoke. And she let him. And she saw the future. She saw herself seated between her two parents as her father drove them across the bridge to Winnisaw. It would be early morning. The doctor would only just have finished his breakfast. He would come to the door to greet them; her father would shake his hand. In his office the doctor would seat himself behind a big dark desk, and she would sit in a chair, and her parents would be together on a sofa, while the doctor explained to them exactly what he was going to do. He would have all his medical degrees right up on the wall, in frames. When she went off with him into the little white operating room, her mother and father would smile at her from the sofa. And they would wait right there until it was time to bundle her up and take her home.
When her father had finished, she said, “It must cost a fortune.”
“The object isn’t money, honey,” he said.
“The object is you,” said her mother.
How nice that sounded. Like a poem. She was just beginning to study poetry, too. Her last English composition had been an interpretation of “Ozymandias.” She had only received the paper back on Monday morning—a B-plus for the first interpretation she had ever written of a poem in college. Only on Monday she had thought it was going to be her last. Before Roy had finally returned to Fort Kean that night, her recurring thought had been to run away. And now she didn’t have to, and she didn’t have to marry him either. Now she could concentrate on one thing and one thing only—on school, on her French, her history, her poetry …
The object isn’t money,
The object is you.
“But where,” she asked softly, “will you get it all?”
“Let me do the worrying about that,” her father said. “Okay?”
“Will you work?”
“Wow,” he said to Myra. “She sure don’t pull her punches, your daughter here.” The red that had risen into his cheeks remained, even as he tried to maintain a soft and joking tone. “Come on, Goosie, what do you say? Give me a break, huh? Where do you think I’ve been all day today, anyway? Taking a stroll on the boulevard? Playing a tennis game? What do you think I’ve been doing all my life since I was eighteen years old, and part-time before that? Work, Lucy, just plain old work, day in and day out.”
“Not at one job,” she said.
“Well … I move around … that’s true …”
She was going to cry: they were talking!
“Look,” he said, “why don’t you think of it this way. You have a father who is a jack of all trades. You should be proud. Come on, Goosie-Pie, how about a smile like I used to get back in prehistoric times? Back when you used to take those ‘yumps.’ Huh, little Goose?”
She felt her mother squeeze her hand.
“Look,” he said, “why do you think people always hire Duane Nelson, no matter what? Because he sits around twiddling his thumbs, or because he knows every kind of machine there is, inside and out? Now which? That’s not a hard question, is it, for a smart college girl?”
… Afterward she would read in bed. She would have her assignments mailed up to her while she recuperated in her bed. Yes, a college girl. And without Roy. He wasn’t so bad; he wasn’t for her, that was all. He would just disappear, and she could begin to make friends at school, friends to bring home with her when she came to visit on the weekend. For things would have changed.
Could that be? At long last those terrible days of hatred and solitude, over? To think, she could begin again to talk to her family, to tell them about all the things she was studying, to show them the books she used in her courses, to show them her papers. Stuck into her English book, right there on the floor, was the essay she had written on “Ozymandias.” B-plus and across the front the professor had written, “Excellent paragraph development; good understanding of meaning; good use of quotations; but please don’t stuff your sentences so.” And maybe she had overdone the main topic sentence somewhat, but her intention had been to state at the outset all those ideas that she would later take up in the body of the essay. “Even a great king,” her paper began, “such as Ozymandias apparently had been, could not predict or control what the future, or Fate, held in store for him and his kingdom; that, I think, is the message that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet, means for us to come away with from his romantic poem Ozymandias,’ which not only reveals the theme of the vanity of human wishes—even a king’s—but deals also with the concept of the immensity of ‘boundless and bare’ life and the inevitability of the ‘colossal wreck’ of everything, as compared to the ‘sneer of cold command,’ which is all many mere mortals have at their command, unfortunately.”
“But is he clean?” she asked.
“A hundred percent,” her father said. “Spotless, Lucy. Like a hospital.”
“And how old?” she asked. “How old is he?”
“Oh,” her father said, “middle-aged, I’d say.”
A moment passed. Then, “That’s the catch, isn’t it?”
“What kind of catch?”
“He’s too old.”
“Now what do you mean ‘too old’? If anything, he’s real experienced.”
“But is this all he does?”
“Lucy, he’s a regular doctor … who does this as a special favor, that’s all.”
“But he charges, you said.”
“Well, sure he charges.”
“Then it’s not a special favor. He does it for money.”
“Well, everybody has got bills to meet. Everybody has got to be paid for what they do.”
But she saw herself dead. The doctor would be no good, and she would die.
“How do you know about him?”
“Because—” and here he stood, and hitched up his trousers. “Through a friend,” he finally said.
“Who?”
“Lucy, I’m afraid maybe that’s got to be a secret.”
“But where did you hear about him?” Where would he hear about such a doctor? “At Earl’s famous Dugout of Buddies?”
“Lucy, that’s not necessary,” said her mother.
Her father walked to the window again. He cleared a pane with the p
alm of his hand. “Well,” he said, “it’s stopped snowing. It’s stopped snowing, if anybody cares.”
“All I meant—” Lucy began.
“Is what?” He had turned back to her.
“—is … do you know anybody who he’s ever done it to, that’s all.”
“Yes, I happen to, for your information.”
“And they’re alive?”
“For your information, yes!”
“Well, it’s my life. I have a right to know.”
“Why don’t you just trust me! I’m not going to kill you!”
“Oh, Duane,” her mother said, “she does.”
“Don’t speak for me, Mother!”
“Hear that?” he cried to his wife.
“Well, he might just be some quack drinking friend who says he’s a doctor or something. Well, how do I know, Mother? Maybe it’s even Earl himself in his red suspenders!”
“Yeah, that’s who it is,” her father shouted. “Earl DuVal! sure! What’s the matter with you? You think I don’t mean it when I say I want you to finish college?”
“Dear, he does. You’re his daughter.”
“That doesn’t mean he knows whether a doctor is good or not, Mother. Suppose I die!”
“But I told you,” he cried, shaking a fist at her, “you won’t!”
“But how do you know?”
“Because she didn’t, did she!”
“Who?”
No one had to speak for her to understand.
“Oh, no.” She dropped slowly back against the headboard.
Her mother, at the side of the bed, covered her face with her hands.
“When?” said Lucy.
“But she’s alive, isn’t she?” He was pulling at his shirt with his hands. “Answer the point I’m making! I am speaking! She did not die! She did not get hurt in any way at all!”
“Mother,” she said, turning to her, “when?”
But her mother only shook her head. Lucy got up out of the bed. “Mother, when did he make you do that?”
“He didn’t make me.”
“Oh, Mother,” she said, standing before her. “You’re my mother.”
“Lucy, it was the Depression times. You were a little girl. It was so long ago. Oh, Lucy, it’s all forgotten. Daddy Will, Grandma, they don’t know,” she whispered, “—don’t have to—”