by Philip Roth
On the first Sunday of June, while they were driving up to Liberty Center, Roy decided he wasn’t going to take his finals the following week. Frankly, he could go in and pass things like camera repair and negative retouching without too much sweat, to use an Army expression. So it wasn’t a matter of chickening out, or of being too lazy to do the studying. There really wasn’t very much studying that he could see to do. What made it senseless to go in and take the final exams—which, by the way, no one had flunked in the history of the photography department, except in LaVoy’s class, where it wasn’t a matter of whether you knew the material anyway but whether you agreed with Hot Shot LaVoy and his big ideas—but what made it senseless was that he had decided not to return to Britannia in the fall. At least that, at any rate, was what he wanted to talk over with her.
But they had already talked it over. To support her and the baby, he was going to have to give up school during the day; but the plan had been for him to enroll in the night program. It would take two years more that way instead of only one, but this was the solution they had agreed upon months before.
Well, that’s why he was bringing it up again. He didn’t see any sense hanging on at that place days or nights. What good did she think that Master of Photographic Arts degree was going to do him anyway? Anybody who knew anything about photography knew that a Britannia degree wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. “And given the day teachers, you can just imagine the geniuses they have teaching there at night. You know who the head of the whole night program is, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“H. Pansy LaVoy. So you can imagine.”
Then he told her his surprise. Yesterday morning he and Mrs. Blodgett had got into a conversation, and the upshot was that he was on the brink of his first commercial job. So who needed Peaches LaVoy? On Monday morning he was to do a portrait sitting of Mrs. Blodgett for a week’s rent, provided she liked the pictures when they came out.
Up in Liberty Center, Alice Bassart took Roy aside early in the afternoon and told him about Lucy’s father blackening her mother’s eye. After dinner Roy got Lucy alone upstairs and as gently as he could broke the news. She immediately put on her coat and scarf and boots, and against Roy’s wishes, went over to the house to see the black eye for herself. And it was not vicious gossip; it was real.
For three days Whitey had been off doing penance for his misdeed—the afternoon he chose to return was the afternoon of his daughter’s visit. He never got through the door.
The baby was born four days later. The labor began in the middle of her English exam, and continued for twelve long, arduous hours. She was awake throughout, swearing to herself every minute of the time that if she survived, her child would never know what life was like in a fatherless house. She would not repeat her mother’s life, nor would her offspring repeat her own.
And so for Roy (and, in a sense, for Whitey Nelson too, who after that Sunday had simply disappeared from the town), the honeymoon came to an end.
His first suggestion to be met with opposition was the one he made while she was still in the hospital. Why didn’t they move back to Liberty Center for the summer? His family would sleep on the screened-in back porch, which they liked to do anyway in the hot weather, and the two of them and Baby Edward could have the upstairs all to themselves. It seemed to him that it would really be a wonderful change for Lucy. As for himself, he could endure living with his parents for a few months, what with all it would mean for Lucy to be able to relax and take it easy for a while. And think what it would mean to the baby, who would surely feel the heat less up in Liberty Center. All in all, it sounded like such a good idea that the previous night, when his parents came to visit at the hospital, he had taken them aside and broached it to them. He hadn’t wanted to tell Lucy beforehand for fear that she would be disappointed if his family had any objections. But actually it had suited them just fine; his mother was absolutely tickled pink by the idea. It was a long while since she had been able to go full steam ahead with her specialty—Pampering with a capital P. Furthermore, the presence of Edward would probably mean the end of that last little bit of tension still existing between themselves and his parents—the unfortunate result of the particular circumstances of the wedding. Moreover, they’d now had six months of marriage, and a really harmonious marriage at that. Roy said he couldn’t get over how compatible they had turned out to be, once all that premarital uncertainty had ended; had he known it was going to be like this, he said, taking her hand in his, he would have proposed from the car that first night he followed her down Broadway. He had to admit that it would give him a certain secret pleasure to go back for a while to Liberty Center and show his doubting Thomas of a father just how fantastically compatible his son’s marriage had turned out to be.
And how, Lucy asked, would Roy support them when they were living in his father’s house?
He assured her that if ever there was a place he could pick up jobs as a free-lance photographer, it was in his own hometown.
No.
No? What did she mean, no?
No.
He couldn’t believe his ears. Why not?
No!
How could he argue with somebody in a hospital bed? For a while he tried, but all he got was no.
Fortunately, in the month after Edward’s birth, Mrs. Blodgett let them bring into the room the crib the Sowerbys had given them, and allowed them even more expanded use of the kitchen facilities, all for only another dollar a week. Moreover, she had accepted the portrait Roy had done of her in exchange for a week’s rent. She thought it made her features look too small, particularly her eyes and mouth, but she said herself that if she expected a professional job she should have gone to a professional; she was an honest person and would not welsh on her end of the bargain. Certainly, said Roy, Lucy had to agree that the landlady was doing the best she could to be considerate. A man and his wife and a tiny infant wasn’t at all what she had bargained for the year before, and so he wished that Lucy would be a little more cordial—or else just say okay, and even if only half the summer was left, agree to go up to his parents’ for a month or so, and live for a while in an environment more suited to their present needs … Well, would she?
Would she what? Which question did he want answered?
Would she go up to Liberty Center?
No.
Just for the month of August?
No.
Well then, at least would she be more pleasant to Mrs. Blodgett when she passed her in the corridor? What did it cost to smile?
She was being as pleasant as was necessary.
But the woman was surely going out of her way—
The woman was being paid the money she asked for her room and her kitchen. If she didn’t like the arrangement, or them, she could ask them to move.
Move? Where?
To an apartment of their own.
But how could they afford an apartment of their own?
How did he think?
“Well, I’m looking for a job. Every day! It’s summer, Lucy! And that’s the truth! The bosses are all on vacation. Every place I go—sorry, the boss is on vacation! And our savings are dwindling like crazy too. If we were up in Liberty Center, we wouldn’t have had to spend a penny all summer long. Instead we’re down here, accomplishing nothing, and the baby is hot, and our money is just dribbling away, and all I do is waste time sitting in offices waiting and waiting for people who aren’t even there. We could all of us have had a little vacation—a vacation all of us need, too, whether you know it or not. Because now do you see what’s happening? We’re arguing. Right this minute we’re having an argument. And why? We’re just as compatible now as we were six months ago, Lucy, but we’re arguing because of living in this one room in all this hot weather, while up in Liberty Center that whole upstairs is just sitting there going to waste.”
No.
Just before Labor Day, Lucy said that since there did not seem to be any jobs for a photograph
er available, perhaps he should start to look for some other kind of work, but Roy said he was not going to get stuck in a job he hated, because the job he liked and was equipped to do hadn’t yet come along.
But their savings were rapidly dwindling, and this money, she reminded him, consisted not only of what he had saved in the Army, but what she had saved during all those years at the Dairy Bar.
Well, he happened to know that. That’s what he had been telling her all summer long. That was exactly what could have been avoided—and then he slammed the door and left the house before she could deliver the speech he saw coming, or before Mrs. Blodgett, who had already hammered on the floor above them with her shoe, could make it down the stairs to deliver hers.
Only an hour later there was a phone call for Roy from Mr. H. Harold LaVoy of the Britannia Institute. He said he understood that Mr. Bassart was looking for a job. He wished to inform him that Wendell Hopkins was in need of an assistant, his previous assistant having just enrolled as a full-time student in Britannia’s television department, which would be getting under way in the fall.
When Roy came home at lunchtime he was flabbergasted at the message. From LaVoy? Hopkins, the society photographer? He was shaved and dressed and out of the house in a matter of minutes; within the hour he had called Lucy to say that he wanted her to put Edward on.
Put Edward on? Edward was sleeping. What was he even saying?
Well then, she had better tell the baby herself: his father was now the assistant to Wendell Hopkins in his studio in the Platt Building in downtown Fort Kean. Well, was it or was it not worth waiting for?
What he couldn’t get over that night at dinner was that LaVoy had thought to call him—even after those disagreements they used to have almost daily in class, during the month that Roy had even bothered to show up. Apparently, however, LaVoy wasn’t really as touchy as he had appeared to be in the classroom. True, the old fruitcake couldn’t take criticism in public, but privately it appeared that he had developed a certain grudging respect for Roy’s knowledge of composition, and light and shadow. Well, you had to give him credit, he was a bigger man than Roy had thought. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t even a fruit; maybe that just happened, unfortunately for him, to be the way he walked and the way he talked. Who knows, if they had ever gotten beyond the arguing stage, LaVoy might even have turned out to be a pretty sharp guy. They might even have become friends. Anyway, what difference did it make now? At the age of twenty-two he was the sole assistant to Wendell Hopkins, who, it turned out, only a few years back had done a portrait of the whole Donald Brunn family of Liberty Center. Oh, what a pleasure it would be to telephone his father directly after dinner and tell him about his new job—not to mention the fact that Mr. Hopkins was the family photographer for his father’s well-known boss.
Before the month was over they had found their first apartment; it was on the top floor of an old house at the north end of Pendleton Park, practically on the outskirts of Fort Kean. The rent was reasonable, the furniture wasn’t bad, and the big trees and quiet street reminded Roy of Liberty Center. There was a bedroom for the baby, and a large living room in which they could also sleep, and a kitchen and bath of their very own. There was also a dank and musty cellar back of the furnace that the renting agent said Roy was welcome to turn into a darkroom, so long as he realized that he would have to leave behind him any improvements he made in the building. The apartment was a twenty-minute drive to downtown, but the prospect of the darkroom clinched the deal.
The thirtieth of September was a Saturday, brisk and cloudy. They spent the morning driving their belongings over to their new home. Late in the day, when the moving was over and they had washed the last of the plates used for their last meal, Roy sat tapping lightly and sporadically on the horn of the car, while Lucy stood up on the porch, the baby in her arms, and told Mrs. Blodgett what she thought of her.
In the next year Roy drove in his car all over Kean County, photographing church socials, Rotary dinners, ladies’-club meetings, Little League games—and, most frequently, grade and high school graduation classes; the biggest share of Hopkins’ business, it turned out, was not out of the Fort Kean social register, but from the Board of Education, of which his brother was a member. Hopkins himself stayed in the studio all day to do the serious sittings—the brides, the babies and the businessmen. His first week Roy had carried around a small spiral notebook in which he had planned to jot down the tips and advice that might pass from the lips of the seasoned old professional during a day’s work. Shortly he came to use it to record the cost of the gas pumped each day into the car.
Edward. A pale little baby with blue eyes and white hair, who for so very long had the sweetest, mildest, most serene disposition. He smiled benevolently up at everyone who looked admiringly down into his carriage when Lucy wheeled him through the park; he slept and ate when he was supposed to, and in between times just smiled away. The elderly couple who lived in the apartment below said they had never known a baby to be so quiet and well behaved; they had been prepared for the worst when they heard that a child was going to be living over their heads, but they had to tell young Mr. and Mrs. Bassart that they had no complaint so far.
Just before Edward’s first birthday, Uncle Julian hired Roy to come up to the house to take the pictures at Ellie’s pinning party. The next day Roy began to talk about leaving his job and opening a studio of his own. How much longer could he go on doing the D.A.R. in the afternoon and the high school prom at night? How much longer could he go on getting peanuts for doing the dreary dirty work, the weekend work, the night work, while Hopkins raked in the money and did all the creative jobs besides (if you could call anything Hopkins did “creative”)? Exactly how long was he supposed to let Hopkins get away with paying only for the gas, while Roy himself absorbed the depreciation on the automobile?
“LaVoy!” said Roy one night, after a gruesome afternoon photographing the boys and girls of the 4H Club. “I really ought to go down to the Britannia and punch that pansy one right in the mouth. Because, you know something, he knew what this job was all along. A glorified errand boy. The photographic technique involved—well, Eddie could do it, for God’s sake. And I’m telling you something, LaVoy knew it. Well, just think about it. Remember how surprised I was? Well, it was actually a piece of vengeance against me—can you imagine?—and I’m so dumb it never dawned on me till today, right in the midst of shooting all those kids going ‘cheese, cheese.’ Well, I’ll show him, and I’ll show Hopkins too. If I started my own place, I’d have half of Hopkins’ portrait trade within a year. And that’s a fact. That I know for a fact. All he needs is a little competition, then he’d be crying Mamma, all right.”
“But where would you run this studio, Roy?”
“Where would I run it? To begin with? Where would I have it? Is that what you mean?”
“Where will you run it? How much will it cost? What will you do to support us until the customers begin to leave Hopkins and come running to you?”
“Oh, damn,” he said, banging a fist on the table, “damn that LaVoy. He really couldn’t take criticism, not the slightest bit of it. And the thing is, I knew it all the time. But that he’d stoop to this—”
“Roy, where do you intend to start a studio?”
“Well—if you want to talk seriously about it …”
“Where, Roy?”
“Well—to start off, there’d have to be another rent, see.”
“Another rent?”
“But that’s what we can rule out. Because we have to, I know. We couldn’t afford it. So, to start off, well … I thought, here.”
“Here?”
“Well, the darkroom I’d have in the basement, of course.”
“And your studio itself would be in our living room?”
“Just during the day, of course.”
“And Edward and myself during the day?”
“Well, as I say, Lucy, it’s open to question, needless to say. I’m cert
ainly willing to talk over the pros and cons, and peacefully too—”
“And the customers?”
“I told you, that would take time.”
“And what darkroom are you even talking about? You haven’t even begun a darkroom. You’ve talked about beginning a darkroom; oh, you’ve talked about it, all right—”
“Well, I work all day long, it so happens, you know. I come home at night bushed, frankly. And half the time on weekends he’s got me going out to some wedding somewhere out in the sticks—oh, forget it. You can’t understand anything about my career. Or my ambitions! I have a kid growing up, Lucy. And I happen to have ambitions that I haven’t given up, you know, just because I’m married. I’m sure not going to be the victim of that LaVoy’s vengeance for the rest of my life, I’ll tell you that. He tricked me right into this job, which is really for a grind, you know—and Hopkins pays me peanuts, compared to what photographers can make, and because I say I want a studio of my own to you, to my own wife—oh, you won’t understand anything! You won’t even try!” And he ran out the door.
It was nearly midnight when he returned.
“Where have you been, Roy? I have been sitting here waiting up for you, not knowing where you were. Where have you been? To some bar?”
“Some what?” he said sourly. “I went to a movie, Lucy, if you have to know. I went into town and saw a movie.”
He went off to the bathroom to brush his teeth.
When the lights were off he said, “Well, I tell you one thing. I don’t know about all the suckers before me, but as far as I’m concerned, Old Tightwad is at least going to split the car insurance starting when it gets renewed. I’m not working my you-know-what off to make him the richest guy in town.”