When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

He looked at her, unable to speak.

  “Lloyd,” said Lucy into the phone, “this is Lucy again. We were cut off.”

  “Look,” said her father-in-law, “go to sleep.”

  “Didn’t you hear a word of what I have been telling you?”

  “I heard it, Lucy. You better go to sleep.”

  “Don’t tell me to go to sleep, Lloyd! Sleep is not the issue at a time like this! Tell me what you intend to do about your son, and your brother-in-law Julian, and their plan!”

  “I am telling you nothing,” Lloyd Bassart said. “I believe it is you who is going to have to do the telling, Lucy. I am not very happy about what I have heard, Lucy. Not one bit,” he said ominously.

  “Tell what? Tell who? I am pregnant! Do you know that? That’s what I have to tell—I am pregnant!”

  “I am afraid I am not going to choose to talk to you any longer in this condition.”

  “But have you heard what I just said? My condition is that I am pregnant with a second child!”

  “As I said, I have heard an earful. I have heard plenty.”

  “Lies! If it’s from them it is lies! I am speaking the truth, Lloyd, the only truth. I am pregnant! He cannot leave me at a time like this!”

  “Good night, Lucy.”

  “Lloyd, you can’t hang up! You’re supposed to be so good, so honest—so respectable! You better not hang up on me! Lloyd, four years ago—it is exactly what he wanted to do then. I was eighteen years old, and he wanted to run then too. Exactly what you would not let him do yourself. Lloyd, it is the same thing—exactly the same as then!”

  “Oh, is it?” he said.

  “Yes!”

  “Yes is right!” It was Alice Bassart.

  “Alice, get off,” said Lloyd.

  “You cheat, you no-good cheat—you tricked our son! And now again!”

  “Alice, I will take care of this.”

  “I tricked him?” said Lucy.

  “Took our son, with a scheming trick! Miss Tomboy! Miss Sarcastic! Miss Sneerface!”

  “Alice!”

  “But he tricked me, Alice! Tricked me to think he was a man, when he’s a mouse, a monster! A moron! He’s a pansy, that’s what your son is, the worst and weakest pansy there ever was!”

  “Willard!” said Berta.

  Daddy Will was standing over the phone, right behind her. “Don’t you—” she said, over her shoulder, “—dare—”

  But he brought his hand down upon the phone and held it there, breaking the connection.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she cried. “The world is caving in! The world is on fire!”

  “Honey, Lucy, it is four A.M.”

  “But haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? Don’t you hear what they are trying to do to me? Don’t you understand what all these good, respectable people really are? I am pregnant! Does that mean nothing to anyone? I am pregnant and my husband refuses to be responsible!”

  “Lucy,” he said softly, “in the morning, honey, if that is really so—”

  “I am not waiting for any morning. By morning—” She tried to yank the phone from his hands.

  “No, honey, no. That’s got to be enough right now.”

  “But the lies are growing every minute! They are saying I tricked him into marrying me. When he seduced me! He made me do it in the back of that car, insisted and insisted and insisted, and wouldn’t stop, ever, and finally against my will, to show him—to let him—I was seventeen years old—and now they’re saying I tricked him! As though I wanted him. Wanted a him like that, ever! I wish he were dead, that’s what I wish. I wish he had never been born.” She glared at Willard. “Give me that phone.”

  “No.”

  “If you do not give me that phone, Daddy Will, then I shall have to take measures of my own. Either you give me that phone and let me call his father … because I want to tell that Lloyd Bassart that he is not going to be such a pillar in the community, if he doesn’t stop this thing, and stop it now. Either you give me that phone—”

  “No, Lucy.”

  “But he seduced me! Don’t you see that? And now they are saying that I seduced him! Because there is nothing they won’t say against me. Nothing they won’t stoop to, to destroy me. Julian Sowerby will stop at nothing—don’t you understand? He hates women! He hates me! He’s trying to crush my life because I know the truth! And I will not let that happen!”

  “Call the doctor, Willard. Dial the doctor,” Berta said.

  “Call a what?” cried Lucy.

  “Berta, in the morning.”

  “Willard, now.”

  “Oh yes, oh sure,” said Lucy to her grandmother. “Oh, wouldn’t you like that? You’ve been waiting all these years to do me in—because I see through you too, you—you selfish-hearted bitch. Call a doctor?” She shook her fists at the two of them. “I am pregnant! I need a husband, not a doctor—a husband for myself and a father for my child—”

  “Dial the doctor,” said Berta.

  But he continued to hold the phone. “Lucy,” he said, “won’t you just go to bed now?”

  “But can you not get it into your head—Julian Sowerby is stealing Edward! A man who is a whoremonger! And they all know it. And they don’t care! He buys women with money, and nobody cares! Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Then what are you going to do about it? The world is full of fiends and monsters, and you do absolutely nothing, and you never did! You listen to her,” she said, pointing to her grandmother. “But I don’t! And I won’t!”

  She started from the kitchen, but Berta stood in the doorway.

  “Let me through, please.”

  Her grandmother said, “Where are you going?”

  “To the police station.”

  “No,” said Daddy Will. “No, Lucy.”

  “Let me by, Grandmother dear. Daddy Will, tell her to let me by, if you have any power over your own wife. I am going upstairs to get my coat and my shoes, and then I am going to the police station. Because they are not getting away with this, none of them. And if they have to come and arrest them all, Roy and Julian and that famous good man, Lloyd Bassart, then that is what they will have to do. Because you cannot steal a child! You cannot ruin a life! You cannot walk out on a marriage and a family! Let me through, please, Grandmother, I am going upstairs for my coat.”

  “Berta,” said Daddy Will, “let her go.”

  “And if you call a doctor once I turn my back, Daddy Will, then you are as bad as they are. I want you to know that.”

  “Let her go, Berta.”

  “Willard—”

  “I’ll call,” he said, nodding.

  “Well,” said Lucy, “the truth will out, won’t it, Daddy Will? I always held out some hope for you, if you care to know. But I was sadly mistaken. Too bad,” she said as she stepped through the doorway and proceeded up the stairs. The door to her mother’s room was closed; she must be awake in there, but as always, too timid and frightened to confront what was happening in her own family.

  When she was dressed for the outdoors she came into the hall, and before heading down the stairs and off to the police station, she stopped at her mother’s door. Should she leave this instant and let the words spoken by her mother that afternoon be the last ever to pass between them? Because once Edward had been returned and disaster averted, she would never again set foot in this house.

  In the parlor below she could hear her grandparents talking, but what they were saying she could not make out. Did it matter? It was clear enough which side they had chosen. She had wept the whole story to Daddy Will as he drove her through the dark town to the house—and he had comforted her. In her exhaustion he had helped her onto her bed, covered her to the chin with a blanket, told her she must rest now, told her that in the morning he would take care of everything—and like one who did not understand what she had understood so long ago, like a fool, like an innocent, she had let his words and her despair d
rag her down into dreams of another world, another here, another now, dreams of sweet Jesus and Father Damrosch and Sister Angelica of the Passion. And now she had awakened to discover that he too had turned against her.

  Oh, how absurd this all was! How unnecessary! Why must they force her always to the extreme? Why must they bring this down upon themselves when the simple and honorable solution was always and forever at hand? If only they did their duty! If only they would be men!

  A doctor. That was who they were waiting for down in the parlor. Dr. Eglund! To give her a pill to make life rosy by morning! To give her a good old-fashioned talking-to! Or was Dr. Eglund a blind? At long last was she to be the benefactor of an abortion designed to get everybody else off the hook? Yes, anything, anything, no matter how it might debase and mortify her—so long as it spared all those respectable people from personal burden and public shame. Oh, but shame was surely going to fall upon them all, once it became known that she had had to be driven up to The Grove in a squad car, in order to recover what they would steal, and shatter, and destroy.

  For that was the choice they had left her. Surely she was not going to return alone to Fort Kean, and leave Edward behind to be assaulted with lies, to be readied by her enemies and his to be a witness against his own mother. She was certainly not going to oblige them by being idiot enough to step into a court of law with Mr. Sowerby and his lawyer, either—to oppose her pennies to Julian’s millions, oppose her scruples to the unprincipled techniques of his attorney, as they pressed their case from one court to another, and the costs mounted, and the lies were piled one atop the other. Oh, just imagine them telling the court how she—a seventeen-year-old high school girl, hopelessly innocent of all sexual experience—had seduced and deceived into marriage a man who happened to have been three years her senior and a veteran of the United States Army. Oh no, she was not about to wait patiently for that—or to wait for Ellie Sowerby, that noted authority on mental illness, to break into tears and testify in a courtroom that in her professional opinion Lucy Bassart was insane, and always had been. Nor did she intend to be a silent witness to that pathetic moment when her own grandfather was called to the stand, and proceeded to tell the judge how he himself figured that maybe the best thing for Lucy was a heart-to-heart chat with the family doctor … No, she did not intend to be frightened of what they themselves had given her no choice now but to do to save the lives of herself, and her children, born and unborn.

  She opened her mother’s door. It was almost dawn.

  “I am going now, Mother.”

  The form beneath the blanket did not move. Her mother lay huddled on the half of the bed nearest the window, her face hidden behind one hand. Lucy pulled on her gloves. On the back of her left hand there was a scratch, where Roy’s tooth had dragged over her flesh.

  “I know you’re awake, Mother. I know you heard what was going on downstairs.”

  She remained motionless under the blanket.

  “I came in here to say something to you, Mother. I’m going to speak whether you respond or not. It would be easier if you could bring yourself to sit up and face me. It would certainly be more dignified, Mother.”

  But there was to be no dignity; that was her mother’s decision, again and again and again. She only turned her face into the pillow, showing her daughter the back of her head.

  “Mother, what I heard earlier in the day—yesterday, it was—about my father—I allowed it to upset me. That’s what I want to tell you. After we left here I thought about what you had said to me. You said, if you remember, Mother, that he was where I always wanted him. You said you hoped that I was happy now. And so I went back to Fort Kean, thinking, ‘Oh, what a terrible person I am.’ I began to think, if it weren’t for me, he could have been spared whatever he is now going through. I thought, ‘He has stayed away almost four years now—and why? He has been afraid even to show his face here. He has had to write to her through a post-office box—all because of me.’ Then I tried to tell myself, no, no, I wasn’t the reason … But do you know something, Mother? I am! Because of his fear of me he is not here—that’s true. Because he is terrified of my judgment. And do you know? That is the only human response that man has ever had, Mother. Staying away—that is the only thing he has been able to do successfully in his entire life.”

  She heard her mother weeping. All at once the sunlight came into the room, and she saw a letter on the blanket. It was cradled in a fold where it must have fallen from her mother’s hand. She had taken it with her into her bed. My God, there is no limit, there is no end.

  As she charged toward the bed, her mother turned to see what was about to happen. And the fright in the woman’s eyes, the grief in her face—oh, her utter hopelessness! “Mother, he is who destroyed our lives.” She grabbed the letter from the bed. “Him!” she cried, shaking it over her head. “This!”

  And then she ran. For Daddy Will burst into the doorway of the bedroom, dressed now in trousers and a shirt.

  “Lucy—” He caught her by the coat, and she heard a tearing sound as she broke away from him and ran wildly down the stairs. Now Grandma Berta was moving toward her through the parlor, but she screamed, “No! You selfish, selfish—” and when her grandmother jumped back, she was able to fling open the door and rush out onto the porch.

  “You stop,” Berta called. “Stop her!”

  But there was no one on the street, no one between herself and downtown.

  Then her legs were shooting out from under her. Her elbows struck the icy ground a second before her chin; a sick sensation went through her, but she was instantly to her feet and across the street, heading toward Broadway. There was an inch of fresh snow over the cleared walks, and patches of ice underfoot, and she knew that if she fell again she would be overtaken, but she ran as fast as she was able to in coat and galoshes, for she had to get to the police station before they could stop her. Daddy Will was already out on the porch; she saw him there in the moment she took to look back. Then a car was pulling up before the house, and Daddy Will was headed down the stairs in his shirtsleeves. Dr. Eglund! They were going to come after her in the car! The car would be alongside her in seconds! Then people would be at their windows, doors would fly open, others would come running out of their houses to give aid to the two old men—to prevent her from ever getting justice done!

  Quickly she turned up a driveway, slid between a car and a house, and plunged across the thick white crust of someone’s yard. A dog barked, and she went sprawling, her foot caught upon a low wire fence buried in a drift. Then she was up, running again. There was a bluish light over everything, and the only noise was the packing sound that rose as her galoshes hammered into the snow and she ran, ran for the ravine.

  But they would be waiting when she arrived! Once they had lost sight of her, they would go directly to the station house. Two old men, thoroughly confused about what actually was going on, without the slightest sense of all that was at stake, would tell the police that she was on her way. And what would the police do? Telephone Roy! By the time she had made her way across town to the ravine, and then up to Broadway by way of the river, her husband would be at the station house, waiting. And Julian! And Lloyd Bassart! And she would arrive last, her coat thick with snow, her face red and wet, breathless and exhausted, looking like some runaway child—which was how she would be treated. Of course! They would have so distorted the facts that instead of the police instantly coming to her aid, they would turn her over to her grandfather, to the doctor …

  But would those others settle for that now? A man like Julian Sowerby knew only one thing—to have his ugly way. His own wife knew, his daughter knew, what he was everybody knew, but as long as he continued to pay everybody off, what did they care? She could hear him, hear them all, promising this, promising that, begging forgiveness, and then going right on being just what they always had been. Because they simply will not reform! They simply will not change! All they will do is get worse and worse! Why were they agai
nst a mother and a child? Why were they against a family, and a home, and love? Why were they against a beautiful life, and for an ugly one? Why did they fight her and mistreat her and deny her, when all she wanted was what was right!

  But where to now? Because she knew what it would mean to continue on to the police station, she knew what Julian Sowerby would try to do; she knew the use to which such a man would put this opportunity, how he would seize it to destroy her, once and for all. Yes, because she knew right from wrong, because she saw her duty and did it, because she knew the truth and spoke it, because she would not sit by and endure treachery and betrayal, because she would not let them steal her little boy, and coddle a grown-up man, and scrape out of her body the new life beginning to grow there—they would try to make it seem that she was the guilty party, that she was the criminal!

  … Where then? To turn back made no sense at all; there was no back. But to run straight into the arms of her enemies—straight into their lies and treachery! She turned and rushed back up the driveway from which she had emerged; she turned this way, the other way, toward Broadway, away from Broadway, and back out to the street again. She scuttled around corners; she withdrew against walls; she stepped deep into drifts. Powder came down into her face. She pressed her head to a drainpipe encased in ice. She fell. Her skin burned. A window flew up; she ran. The blue light became gray. She began to come upon the footprints she had left in the snow minutes earlier.

  Then she was looking up into the kitchen window at the rear of Blanshard Muller’s house. With one shoulder she pushed open the garage door, slipped inside and closed the door behind her. Gripping her side, she leaned across the trunk of the car, lowered her head and closed her eyes. Colors swam. She tried not to think. Why should he hate me like poison? He doesn’t! He can’t! That’s Roy’s lie!

  With tremulous breaths she filled her lungs, and the sensation that all sound was being pushed outward from the inside of her head diminished. She began to be swept with chills, then grew strangely calm at the sight of the objects arranged against the side wall of the garage: a coil of garden hose, a shovel, half a bag of cement, a deflated tire tube, a pair of hip boots.