When She Was Good (10 page)

Consequently, he found that he would just as soon spend his evenings at the Sowerbys’ as hang around at home, where he either had to keep the radio at a whisper because his father was upstairs writing some report for Mr. Brunn, or else his father was downstairs and they were discussing something called Roy’s Future as though it were a body he had found on the front lawn: now look here, Roy, what do you intend to do with it?

As for Lloyd Bassart’s disapproval of Roy’s nightly social call over to the Sowerbys’ (and of his brother-in-law Julian as an influence and confidant), he disguised his real objections by saying that he didn’t feel Roy should make himself a permanent fixture in another family’s house simply because they had a television set. Roy said why should his father mind if the Sowerbys themselves didn’t? Uncle Julian was interested in what the postwar Army was like, and in what the younger generation was thinking, and so he liked to talk to Roy. What was so wrong with that?

However, the “talks” between Julian and Roy consisted, as frequently as not, of Julian’s pulling Roy’s leg. Julian got a kick out of kidding Roy, and Roy got sort of a kick out of
being kidded, since it really put them on a buddy relationship. Of course, sometimes Julian went too far with his kidding, particularly the night Roy had said he really didn’t think he could ever be satisfied as a human being unless he was doing something creative. As it happened, he was only repeating something he had once heard Bellwood say, but it applied equally as well to him, even though he hadn’t thought it up personally. Uncle Julian, however, chose deliberately to miss the point, and said it sounded to him as though what Roy needed was a good piece. Roy had laughed it off and tried to act nonchalant, even though his Aunt Irene was in the dining room, where she could hear every word they said.

Julian’s sense of humor wasn’t always up Roy’s alley. It was one thing if you were in the barracks, or the motor-pool office, to say f. this and f. that, and another when there were women around. Where Uncle Julian’s language was concerned, Roy felt his father had his strongest case. And then sometimes Julian got his goat with his opinions on art, which were totally uninformed. It wasn’t the security angle he wanted Roy to think about before going off to some la-dee-da art school; it was the sissy angle. “Since when did you become a lollipop, Roy? Is that what you were doing up there in the North Pole, turning pansy on the taxpayers’ money?”

But by and large the kidding was good-natured, and the arguments they had didn’t last very long. Though Uncle Julian was just a couple of inches over five feet, he had been an infantry officer during the war, and had nearly had his left ball shot off more times than he could count. And even though he said it just that way, regardless of the age or sex of anyone listening, you had to admire him, because it was the pure truth. The guy who had called out “Nuts!” to the enemy had gotten all the publicity at the time, but apparently Julian had been known throughout the 36th Division as “Up Yours” Sowerby; more than once that was the message he had shouted back to the Germans, when another man would have withdrawn or even surrendered. He had risen to the rank of major and been awarded a Silver Star; even Lloyd Bassart took his
hat off to him on that score, and had invited him to address the student body of the high school when he returned from the war. Roy remembered it yet: Uncle Julian had used hell and damn twelve times in the first five minutes (according to a count kept by Lloyd Bassart), but fortunately thereafter simmered down, and when he was finished, the students had risen to their feet and sung “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along” in his honor.

Julian called Roy “you long drink of water,” and “you big lug,” and “Slats,” and “Joe Slob,” and hardly ever just Roy. Sometimes his nephew had no sooner stepped into the foyer than Julian had his fists up and was dancing back into the living room, saying, “Come on, come on, Slugger—try and land one.” Roy, who had learned in gym class how to throw a one-two punch (though he had not yet had occasion to use it in the outside world), would come after Julian, open-handed, leading with his right, while Uncle Julian would bob and weave, cuffing aside the
one
before Roy could deliver the
two
. Roy would circle and circle, looking in vain for his opening, and then—it never failed to happen—Julian would cock back his right arm, cry “Ya!” and even as Roy was ducking his chin behind his fists and hiding his belly back of his elbows (just as he had been taught in high school), Julian would already be swinging one leg around sideways to give his nephew a quick soft boot in the behind with the toe of his bedroom slipper. “Okay, Slim,” he’d say, “sit down, take a load off your mind.”

But the best thing about Julian wasn’t his happy-go-lucky manner: it was that his experience in the Army made him appreciate how hard it was for an ex-G.I. to adjust back to civilian life at the drop of a hat. Roy’s father had been too young for World War I and too old for World War II, and so the whole business of being a veteran was just one more aspect of modern life that he couldn’t get into his head. That a person’s values might have changed after two years of military service didn’t seem to mean anything to him. That a person might actually
benefit
from a breather in which he got a chance to talk over some of what he had learned, to digest it,
didn’t strike him as anything but a waste of precious time. He really made Roy’s blood boil.

Julian, on the other hand, was willing to listen. Oh, he made plenty of suggestions too, but there was a little difference between somebody making a
suggestion
and somebody giving you an
order
. So all through that fall and into the winter, Julian listened, and then one evening in March, while he and Roy were smoking cigars and watching the Milton Berle Show, Roy suddenly began during the commercial to say that he was starting to think that maybe his father was right, that all this valuable time was just slipping through his fingers, like water itself.

“For crying out loud,” Julian said, “what are you, a hundred?”

“But that isn’t the point, Uncle Julian.”

“Come on, get off your own back, will you?”

“But my life—”

“Life? You’re twenty years old. You’re a twenty-year-old kid. Twenty, Long John—and it won’t last forever. For Christ’s sake, live it up a little, have a good time, get off your own back. I can’t stand hearing it any more.”

And so the next day Roy finally did it; he hitched over to Winnisaw and bought a two-tone, second-hand 1946 Hudson.

F
rom between the curtains in her bedroom, Ellie Sowerby and her friend Lucy watched him begin to take it apart and put it together again. Every once in a while he would stop and sit up on the fender, with his knees to his chest, swinging a Coke bottle back and forth in front of his eyes. “The war hero is thinking about his future,” Eleanor would say, and the very idea caused her to snort out loud. Roy, however, appeared to pay no attention to either of them, even when Eleanor rapped on the window and ducked away. As the weather grew warmer, he would sometimes be seen slouched down in the back of the Hudson, his legs thrown up over the front seat, reading a book he had taken out of the library. Ellie would call out the window, “Roy, where in Sweden are you going to live?” To which his answer would generally be a loud slam of the rear door of the car. “Roy’s reading all about Sweden. Half the farmers around here came running from there. He wants to
go
there.”

“Really?” asked Lucy. She did not take offense, because her own grandfather who had been a farmer had come from Norway.

“Well, I hope he goes somewhere,” Ellie said. “My father’s worried he’s liable to decide to move in with us. He practically
lives here as it is.” Then, out the window, “Roy, your mother phoned to say she’s selling your bed.”

But by this time he was under the car, the soles of his shoes all that was visible from the second floor. The only time that he appeared to experience the girls as alive was down in the living room, when he wouldn’t move his legs so much as half an inch, and the two had to step over him to get out through the French doors to the back lawn. Generally he acted as though teams had been chosen, himself and his Uncle Julian on one, and the two girls and Mrs. Sowerby on the other.

But if there were such sides, Lucy Nelson had no sense that Irene Sowerby was on hers. Though Mrs. Sowerby was polite and hospitable to her face, Lucy was almost certain that behind her back the woman disapproved of who and what she was. The very first time Ellie had brought her home, Mrs. Sowerby had called Lucy “dear” right off the bat; and a week later Ellie was no longer her friend. She disappeared from her life as unexpectedly as she had come into it, and the person responsible was Irene Sowerby, Lucy was sure. Because of what she knew about Lucy’s family, or because of whatever she had heard about Lucy herself, Mrs. Sowerby had decided that she was not the kind of girl she wanted Ellie bringing home in the afternoons.

That was in September of senior year. In February (as if four months of conduct not quite becoming so refined a young lady hadn’t intervened) Ellie slid a note, all cheery and intimate, into Lucy’s locker, and after school they were walking together up to The Grove. Of course Lucy should have left her own note in return: “No, thank you. You may be insensitive to the feelings of others but you are not going to be insensitive to mine and get away with it. I am not nothing, Ellie, whether your mother thinks so or not.” Or perhaps she should not have given Ellie the courtesy of any reply, and just let her show up at the flagpole at three-thirty to find no Lucy waiting breathlessly to be her idea of a “friend.”

She felt bitter toward Eleanor, not only because she had picked her up so enthusiastically and dropped her so suddenly, but because Ellie’s instantaneous display of affection had
caused Lucy to make a decision she wouldn’t otherwise have made, and which later she was to regret. But that was not really Eleanor’s fault as much as it was her own (or so she seemed willing to believe as she reread the note scrawled across the blue stationery monogrammed EES at the top). The reason she should have nothing to do with Ellie Sowerby was because she was Ellie’s superior in every way imaginable, except for looks, which she didn’t care that much about; and money, which meant nothing; and clothes; and boys. But just as she had known Ellie to be her inferior, and had gone off with her when invited back for a second afternoon in September, so in the last week of February she followed along once again.

Where else was there to go? Home? As of February 28 she had only two hundred more days to live in that house with those people (times twenty-four is four thousand eight hundred hours—sixteen hundred of them in bed, however) and then she would be down in the new Fort Kean branch of the women’s state college. She had applied for one of the fifteen full honors scholarships available to in-state students, and though Daddy Will said that to have received anything at all was an honor, she had been awarded only what the letter of congratulation called “A Living Aid Scholarship,” covering the yearly dorm bill of one hundred and eighty dollars. She would be graduating twenty-ninth in a class of one hundred and seventeen, and now she wished that she had worked and slaved for A’s in those courses like Latin and physics, where she had felt it a real victory to get even a B-minus. Not that financial difficulties were going to prevent her going off to school. Over the years her mother had somehow managed to save two thousand dollars for Lucy’s education; this, plus Lucy’s own eleven hundred dollars in savings, plus the Living Aid Scholarship, would see her through four years, provided she continued to work full time at the Dairy Bar in the summers and was careful about spending on extras. What disappointed her was that she had wanted to go off completely independent of them; as of September, 1949, she had hoped to have to rely upon them for nothing more for the rest of her
life. The previous summer she had settled upon Fort Kean State College because it was the least expensive good school she could find, and the one where she had her strongest chance to get financial assistance; she had declined to apply anywhere else, even after her mother had revealed the existence of her secret “college fund.”

Why Lucy detested taking the money was not only because it would continue to bind her to home, but because she knew how it had been paid out to her mother, and she knew why too. Almost into the fifth grade she had thought it made her rather special to be the daughter of Mrs. Nelson, the piano teacher; then, all at once, the kids waiting on the porch in warm weather or sitting on their coats in the hallway in winter, were her own classmates—and that fact caused her to be filled with a kind of dread. No matter how fast she ran home from school, no matter how silently she tried to make it into the house, there would always be some child already at the piano, invariably a boy, who invariably would turn his head away from his lesson in time to catch sight of his classmate, Lucy Nelson, scooting up the stairs to her room.

At school she came to be known not as the kid whose mother gives the piano lessons but the kid whose father hangs around Earl’s Dugout—of that she was sure, though the division she now sensed between herself and her schoolmates was such that it did not permit her to ask what they actually thought, or to learn what it was they really did say behind her back. She pretended, of course, that hers was a normal household, even after she had begun to realize it was not—even after her mother’s pupils went back out into town to spread the story of what Lucy Nelson’s family was really like.

Of course, when she was small, she was nearly able to believe it when she told her friends that it was actually her grandparents who lived with them in their house, and not the other way around. Right off she told new friends that why she couldn’t bring anyone home in the afternoon was because her grandmother, whom she loved dearly, had to take her nap then. And she had new friends often. There was a period when
every girl her age who moved to town heard from Lucy about her grandmother’s nap. But then a new girl named Mary Beckley (whose family moved on again the following year) began to giggle at the story, and Lucy knew that somebody had already cornered Mary Beckley and told her Lucy’s secrets. This so angered Lucy that tears came popping out of her eyes, and that so frightened Mary that she swore on her life that she’d giggled only because her baby sister took naps too …