by Philip Roth
The months passed. No further mention was made of the studio, though from time to time Roy would mutter about LaVoy. “I wonder if the administration of that so-called school knows about that guy. A real honest to God homemade fruitcake, just like you hear about. Old la-dee-da LaVoy. H. Harold. Boy, would I love to run into him downtown some day, would I love to confront him some day face to face.”
One Sunday in the spring when they were visiting Liberty Center, Lucy overheard Roy’s mother saying that a package had arrived for him and was up in his bedroom on the dresser. Driving home that night she asked him what was in the package.
“What package?” said Roy.
The next day, after cleaning up from breakfast and making Edward’s bed, she began to search the apartment. Not until after lunch, when Edward was napping, did she find a small box jammed down into the top of one of Roy’s old Army boots, way at the back of the hall closet. The box was from a printing firm in Cleveland, Ohio; inside were hundreds and hundreds of business cards reading
BASSART PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIO
Finest Photographic Portraiture
in all Fort Kean
When Roy came home in the evenings, he usually played this game with his little boy (bushed as he might be). “Ed?” Roy would say as he came through the door. “Hey, has anybody here seen Edward Bassart?” whereupon Edward would pop up from behind the sofa, and aiming himself for the front door, go running full tilt into his father’s arms. Roy would sweep him up off the floor and twirl him around overhead, crying out in mock amazement, “Well, I’ll be darned. I will be absolutely be darned. It’s the original Edward Q. Bassart himself.”
The evening of the day Lucy had discovered his secret, Roy came through the door, Edward ran wildly to him, Roy swung him up over his head, and Lucy thought, “No! No!”—for suppose the tiny, innocent, laughing child were to take his father for a man, and grow up in his image?
She controlled herself throughout the dinner and while Edward was read to by Roy, but after he had put his son to bed she was waiting for him in the living room with the package from Cleveland, Ohio, sitting on the coffee table. “When are you going to grow up? When are you going to do the job you have without looking for every single way there is to get out of it? When?”
His eyes filled with tears and he rushed out of the apartment.
Again it was midnight before he returned. He’d had a hamburger, and gone to another movie. He took off his coat and hung it in the closet. He went into Edward’s room; when he came out—still refusing to engage her eye—he said, “Did he wake up?”
“When?”
He picked up a magazine and spoke while flipping through it. “While I was gone.”
“Fortunately, no.”
“Look,” he said.
“Look what?”
“Oh,” he said, plunging into a chair, “I’m sorry. Well, I am,” he said, throwing up his arms. “Well, look, am I forgiven or what?”
He explained that he had seen the ad for the business cards in the back of a trade magazine down at Hopkins. A thousand cards—
“Why not ten thousand, Roy? Why not a hundred thousand?”
“Let me finish, will you?” he cried.
A thousand cards was the smallest amount you could order. That was the bargain, a thousand for five ninety-eight. Okay, he was sorry he had done it without talking first to her; that way they could have argued out the sense of ordering the cards before some of the other things were planned. He knew that as far as she was concerned it wasn’t the money but the principle of the thing.
“It’s both, Roy.”
Well, maybe both, according to her, but really and truly he didn’t know how much longer he could stand the way Hopkins was exploiting him for sixty-five lousy dollars a week. At this point the resale value on the Hudson was practically nil. If she was so concerned about five ninety-eight for business cards, what about that, the depreciation on the car? And what about a little thing called his career? Last week, two whole evenings photographing practically every single Brownie and Cub Scout in the country! By now he would have been a graduate of Britannia, if he hadn’t had to go out and get a stupid job like this one so as to support a family.
“But you didn’t want to graduate from Britannia.”
“I’m talking about the time that’s passed, Lucy, while I do Hopkins’ dirty work!”
Well, if he wanted to talk about time, she would have been a junior now, and a senior in the fall; in a year she would be graduating from college. Well, said Roy, don’t act as though it’s my fault. But it was his fault, she said; whose idea was that “interruption” business but his? Look, he said, they’d been over all that a hundred times already. Over what, Roy? Over that the interruption had worked all summer, for one—and for another, she had let him do it. She had let him do it, she said, because he had forced it on her, because he had insisted and insisted—Okay! he cried. Then you have to take the consequences, she told him, you have to pay the price for what you do! All my life? he asked. A whole life long pay the price for that? God damn it, just because he’d had to marry her didn’t mean that he had to be the slave of Hopkins for the rest of his life, or the patsy of some no-good rotten pansy fruit!
“LaVoy has nothing to do with this!” she cried.
“Oh, and I suppose Hopkins doesn’t either, according to you?”
“He doesn’t!”
“Oh, no? Oh, you don’t happen to think so, do you? Who does then, Lucy, just me? Just me and no one else?”
The tears flowed from his eyes, and once again he ran for the door. He drove straight up to Liberty Center and did not return until the following afternoon.
Looking very determined. He wanted to have a serious talk, he said, like adults. About what? she asked. She happened to have a two-year-old child to take care of while he went off downtown to a movie, or running home to his Mommy. She happened to have a bright, alert little boy, who got up in the morning and found his father missing and didn’t know what to make of it at all.
Roy followed her around the living room, trying to make himself heard over the sounds of the vacuum cleaner. Finally he pulled out the plug and refused to surrender it until she heard him out. What he wanted to talk about was a separation.
A what? Please, she told him, Edward was in his bedroom taking his nap. “What are you even saying, Roy?”
“Well, a sort of temporary separation. So we can both sort of calm down. So we can think things through, and probably afterward be all the better for it … An armistice, sort of.”
“Who have you been talking to, Roy, about our private life?”
“No one,” he said. “I just did some thinking. Is that unheard of, that a person should do some thinking about his own private life?”
“You are repeating someone else’s idea. Well, is that or is that not true?”
He threw the plug to the floor and once again was out of the house.
Edward, it turned out, had not been napping; at the start of the argument he had run from his bedroom to the bathroom and fastened the little hook that locked the door. Lucy knocked and knocked. She promised him all kinds of treats if only he would just lift the little hook out of the eye of the little screw. She said Daddy was upset about something that had happened at his work, but that nobody was angry at anybody. Daddy had gone off to work, and would be home for dinner, just like every other night. Didn’t he want to play his game with Daddy? She begged him to open up. Meanwhile she pressed and pressed against the door, thinking that the screw might ease free of the old boards of the house. In the end she had to bang the door sharply with her shoulder for the thing to pull out of the wall.
Edward was sitting under the washbasin, holding a washcloth over his face. He sobbed hysterically when he heard her approaching, and only after half an hour of holding and rocking him in her arms was she able to persuade him that everything was all right.
She was in bed when Roy came home that night and began to undress in the dark
. She turned on the light and as softly as she could, fearing for Edward’s sleep, she asked him to sit down and listen to her. They had to talk. He had to be made to understand what his behavior was doing to Edward’s peace of mind. She told him about Edward’s locking himself in the bathroom—a two-year-old child, Roy. She told him what it had been like to see him sitting there under the basin, hiding behind a washcloth. She told him that he could not keep running off and expect that their child, tiny as he was, was not going to understand that something was going on between his mother and his father. She told him that he could not come home from work and be all lovey-dovey to a little two-year-old, and play with him, and read to him, and kiss him good night, and then just not be there in the morning. Because the child was able to put two and two together, whether Roy knew it or not.
Several times Roy tried to speak in his defense, but she went right on, refusing to be interrupted until the truth was heard, and after a while Roy just sat there on the edge of the sofa bed, his head in his hands, saying he was sorry. Had Eddie really locked himself in the bathroom?
She told him how she’d had to force herself inside.
Oh God. He felt awful. He didn’t know what was happening to him. He was just so emotionally wrought up. Nothing like this had ever happened to him in his life. How could she possibly think that he wanted to harm Edward? He loved him. He adored him. All afternoon long he looked forward to that moment when he would throw open the door and Edward would come racing at him from across the living room. He loved him so. And he loved her, he really did, even if he hadn’t been acting like it. That’s what made it all so confusing. She was the most important person in his life, now as always. She was so strong, so good. She was probably one of the most incredible girls for her age there had ever been. Look at Ellie—at twenty she had already dumped Joe Whetstone to get pinned to this guy Clark, and within six months was already de-pinned from Clark and going steady with this guy Roger. Look at the average twenty-year-old girl, then look at Lucy, and all she’d had to suffer. He knew what her father had put her family through. He knew all the things she’d had to do to save her family from him when they wouldn’t save themselves. He knew what it must be like for her, to have to remember that it was she who finally had to lock the door on him, to send him away so that he never came back to ruin her mother’s life.
She said that she never thought about it. Where he was, was not her concern.
Well, he thought about it. He knew she did not like to talk about her father, but the point was, he wanted her to know that it was her courage in the face of her father’s behavior that he had always admired, and always would. She had courage. She had strength. She knew right from wrong. There was no one in the world like her. He felt privileged and honored to be her husband, did she know that? Oh, why was he crying? He didn’t seem able to help it. He hadn’t meant to do little Eddie any harm, she must know that. He didn’t mean to do her any harm, to cause anybody in the world the least little harm or hardship. Didn’t she know that? Because it was the truth. He wanted to be good, really he did. Oh, please, oh, please, she had to understand.
He was kneeling on the floor, his head in her lap, weeping uncontrollably. Oh, God, my God, he said. Oh, he had something to tell her. And she had to hear him out, she had to understand and to forgive. She had to let it be over, once he told her, and never bring it up again, but she had to know the truth.
What truth?
It was just that he had been so mixed up. He hadn’t even known what he was thinking about or what he was doing. She had to understand that.
Understand what?
Well, in Liberty Center he had not gone to stay with his family; he had stayed with the Sowerbys. He admitted that the idea of a separation was not his but his uncle’s.
Not even a week passed. At dinner one evening he began to grumble again about being shoved around by Hopkins. Before she even had a chance to reply, Edward had gotten up off the kitchen floor, where he had been playing, and rushed away.
She threw down her napkin. “Must you whine! Must you complain! Must you be a baby in front of your own child!”
“But what did I say?”
This time he stayed away two full days. On the second morning Hopkins telephoned to inform her that he didn’t know how much longer he could put up with this disappearing act of young Roy’s. She said that there was illness again in Liberty Center. Hopkins said he sympathized, if that was the truth, but he had a business to run. Lucy said she understood that, and so did Roy; she was expecting him back momentarily. Hopkins said so was he. And he hoped that when he did return he’d be better able to keep his mind on his work. Apparently two weeks back Roy had shot the Kiwanis luncheon down in Butler without any film in the camera.
That afternoon Julian Sowerby’s lawyer telephoned from Winnisaw. He said that he was representing Roy. He wanted to suggest to her that she have her own lawyer get in touch with him. “Please,” she replied, “I haven’t time for nonsense.”
He said that either she should get somebody to represent her or else they would serve the divorce papers on her personally.
“Oh, you will? And on what grounds, may I ask? Is it me who runs off? Is it me who doesn’t show up for his job, who doesn’t concentrate on it even when he’s there? Is it me who breaks into tears and tantrums in front of a little tiny child? Is it me who dreams up business cards for a business I couldn’t even begin to run? Don’t tell me to get a lawyer, sir. Tell your client Mr. Sowerby to tell his nephew to grow up. I have an apartment to look after, and a confused little boy whose father keeps running out the door to get the advice of a disreputable and irresponsible person. Goodbye!”
Roy returned a new man. All that crying business was over, finished, couldn’t even understand it. Must have been off his nut, honestly. He had sat down with his father and talked the whole thing out. Till then Lloyd Bassart had known nothing about his son’s secret visits up to Liberty Center. Roy had asked the Sowerbys not to speak of it, and though the first time they had agreed, when it happened again Irene Sowerby said she felt she had no choice but to tell her own sister what was going on.
The experience with his father hadn’t been any picnic either. They had sat up together in the kitchen one whole night, clear through to dawn, hammering out their differences of opinion. Don’t think voices weren’t raised and tempers short. But they had stuck with it anyway, till daylight actually began to come through the back windows of the house. He by no means, even now, agreed with everything his father had said; and he could hardly bear the thought of the way he said it. Half of it was out of Bartlett’s quotation book, to begin with. Nevertheless, arguing out all he had been brooding over for a long time—some of which she herself didn’t even know about—well, it had given him the chance he needed to get a lot off his chest. It hadn’t been easy, she could imagine, but he had gotten his father to admit that Hopkins was most definitely exploiting him, and exploiting the Hudson too. Secondly, he had gotten him to agree that if Roy had the financial backing (so that it wouldn’t be a slap-dash operation right off the bat) a studio of his own was certainly not beyond his capabilities. If it hadn’t been beyond Hopkins all these years, it surely wasn’t beyond him, that Roy could guarantee. In the end he had made it clear to his father that it was a sacrifice, and a hard one too, but that he was willing temporarily to give up his professional ambitions for the welfare of his wife and child. He had only wanted his father to recognize that sacrifice was exactly the word to describe what it was.
And once his father would—around five in the morning—everything else sort of fell into place. The decision to come back to Lucy was Roy’s own, however, and he wanted her to know that. All the pissing and moaning of the previous weeks (if she could pardon him using a crude but accurate old Army phrase), well, it was as much a mystery to him as it must be to her. But it was over, that was for damn sure. God damn sure. There was a decision to face and he had faced it. He had come back. And why? Because that’s what
he wanted to do. And if there was anything he ought to be forgiven, then he wanted to ask to be forgiven, too. Not down on bended knee either, but standing up and looking her right in the eye. He wanted her to know that he was a big enough person to admit to a mistake, if he had made one. And in a way he supposed he had—though it was actually more complicated than that.
But enough explaining. Because explaining was just a way of begging, and he wasn’t begging for anything. No pity, no sympathy, no nothing. He was willing to let bygones be bygones, and to start in clean and fresh, and be a lot better off for the experience—if she was.
She said she would not forgive him unless he promised never to speak to Julian Sowerby again as long as he lived.
As long as he lived?
Yes, as long as they all lived.
But the thing was, he had really sort of led Julian down the wrong path, in terms of what he wanted.
She did not care.
“But as long as I live—well, that’s sort of ridiculous, Lucy. I mean, that might be a very long time.”
“Oh, Roy–!”
“I only mean I don’t want to start off making a promise I’m not going to keep, that’s all. I mean, a year from now, who knows? Well, look, either bygones are bygones, or they’re not. A year from now—heck, a month from now, it’s all going to be so much water under the bridge. Well, I sure hope it will be. It will be at my end, I know that. I mean, it is now, really.”
She had no choice. How else prevent him from ever again seeking the counsel of that man? It was wrong to break a confidence, but if she failed now to tell him the truth, what would prevent him from rushing back to Julian Sowerby the very next time he wanted to find the easy way out of his responsibilities and obligations? How else could she make him see that the uncle who pretended to be so nice and kind and easygoing, all jokes and laughs and free cigars, was at bottom a cruel, corrupt, deceitful human being?