When She Was Good (26 page)

One Sunday evening, while driving back down to Fort Kean, Roy said, “Well, it looks as though your old man is really on the wagon this time.”

“I hate him, Roy. And I will always hate him. I told you long ago, and I meant it:
I don’t want to talk about him, ever!
”

“Okay,” said Roy lightly, “okay,” and so no quarrel resulted. He seemed willing to forget that he had even brought up the subject—as willing as he was to forget that hatred of which Lucy had sought to remind him.

So they set off, Sunday after Sunday, like any young married couple visiting the in-laws. But why?
Why?

Because that’s what they were: she was his wife. And her mother his mother-in-law. And her father, with the thick new mustache and the bright new plans, was Roy’s father-in-law. “But I’d really rather not, Roy, not today.” “Come on, we’re up here, aren’t we? I mean, how would it look if we went away without even saying hello? What’s the big deal? Come on, honey, don’t act like a kid, get in the car—careful, watch the old belly.”

And she did not argue. Could it be she had actually argued her last? She had fought and fought to get him to do his duty, but in the end he had done it. So what more was there to fight about? She simply could not find the strength to raise her voice.

And she must respect him anyway. She must not pick at what he said, or challenge his opinions, or take issue with him, especially on matters where his knowledge was superior to her own. Or was supposed to be. She was his wife; she must be sympathetic to his point of view, even if she didn’t always agree with it, as she surely didn’t when he began to tell her how much more he knew than the teachers at Britannia.

Unfortunately, Britannia hadn’t turned out to be the place it was cracked up to be in all those fancy brochures. For one thing, it hadn’t been established in 1910, at least not as a photography school. They had only decided to branch out into photography after the war, so as to catch a bigger hunk of the G.I. Bill trade. For the first thirty-five years of its existence it had been a drafting school called the Britannia Technical Institute, and two thirds of the students still were guys interested in getting into the building business—which was how Roy came to know so much about the prefab boom. The drafting students, as a matter of fact, weren’t too bad; it was the photography students who were a scandal. Though you had to fill out a long entrance application, and with it send samples of your work, it turned out that there weren’t any real entrance requirements at all. The procedure for photography applicants was just a ruse to make you think that the new department had some sort of standards. And the quality of the faculty, he said, was even more appalling than the quality of the students—particularly one H. Harold LaVoy, who somewhere along the line had got the idea that he was some sort of expert on photographic technique. Some expert. There was more to be learned about composition by flipping through an issue of
Look
than spending a lifetime listening to a pompous idiot like LaVoy (who some of the guys said might be a fairy, besides. A real queer. For Lucy’s edification, he imitated
LaVoy walking down the halls. A bit la-dee-da, didn’t she agree? But even a homo could teach you something if he knew something. But a dumb homo—well, that was just about the end).

LaVoy’s class was at eight in the morning, Roy’s first of the day. He got up and went off to it faithfully every single morning of the first month of the second semester, every morning went off to listen to that nasal-voiced know-it-all going on and on about absolutely nothing that a ten-year-old kid couldn’t figure out if he had a pair of twenty-twenty eyes. “Shadows are produced, gentlemen, by placing object A between the sun and object B.” Bro
ther
. One stormy morning they got as far as the front porch, when Roy turned around, came back into the room, and Army boots, field jacket and all, threw himself back on the bed, moaning, “Oh, I don’t mind a homo, really, but a
dumb
homo!” He said he could find better uses to make of that hour right here in their room, he was sure. And since his next class wasn’t until eleven, by staying home he would be saving not only the hour LaVoy shot for him, but the two hours following, which he usually spent down in the lounge, watching one of the endless blackjack games that was always in session. It was so smoky and noisy down there that that’s about all you could do. Having a conversation about photography was practically impossible—not that any of his fellow students seemed to be disposed in that direction anyway. Sometimes with those guys it actually seemed to him that he was back in the day room up in the Aleutians.

And what did Lucy do? She went down to the corner and caught the crosstown bus to school for her eight o’clock. Roy said he would drive her over if she wanted; now that she was getting bigger he didn’t like the idea of her taking public transportation, or walking around on slippery streets. But she declined that first morning, and on those snowy mornings thereafter. It was all right, she said, there was nothing to worry about, she preferred not to inconvenience him by taking him away from his studying
if that’s what studying was to him, sitting up in bed with a scissors and the magazines his
mother saved for him every week, eating handfuls of those Hydrox cookies!
But maybe he knew what he was doing. Maybe the school
was
a fraud. Maybe his colleagues
were
dopes. Maybe LaVoy
was
pompous and an idiot, and a homosexual too. Maybe everything he said was true and everything he did was right.

That was what she told herself, walking through the snow to the bus, and then in class, and in the library, and in the coffee shop, where she went by herself for her lunch, after her one-thirty. Most of the girls ate in the cafeteria at noon, as she had when she lived in the dorm, and she preferred now to avoid them whenever she could manage it. Eventually one of them would take a sidelong glance at her belly, and why did she have to put up with that? There was no reason for any of those little freshman twerps to look down their noses at her. To them she might only be the kid who’d had to get married over Christmas, somebody to whisper about and make fun of, but to herself she was Mrs. Roy Bassart, and she didn’t intend to go around feeling ashamed of herself all day long. She had nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of or to regret. So she ate her lunch, alone, at two-thirty, in the last booth of The Old Campus Coffee Shop.

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.”