When She Was Good (35 page)

She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep … Perhaps she did sleep, because for a while she was able to drive out of her mind any recollection of what had been said to her that afternoon.

They were almost into Fort Kean. To Edward, who had remained awake all the way down, watching the wipers beat the heavy snow off the window, Roy was saying, “… so the captain came in and asked, ‘Who here is willing to go off and help this Eskimo find his dog?’ And so I thought to myself, ‘Sounds like there might be some fun in it—’ ” and it was here that Lucy screamed.

Roy maneuvered the car over to the side of the road. When he leaned across Edward to touch her, she pulled her shoulder away and huddled against the door.

“Lucy!”

She pressed her mouth into the cold window.
The whole thing is not worth a moment’s consideration
.

“Lucy—”

And she screamed again.

Bewildered, Roy said, “Lucy, is it a pain? Where? Lucy, did I say something—?”

He sat a moment longer, waiting to hear if it was something he had said or done. Then he edged the car back onto the road and headed into the city. “Lucy, you all right now? You better? … Honey, I’ll go fast as I can. It’s slippery, you’ll just have to hang on …”

Edward sat frozen between them. From time to time Roy reached over and patted the little boy’s leg. “Everything’s okay, Eddie. Mommy just has a little pain.”

At the house the child followed behind, clutching to the back of his father’s trousers, as Roy helped her up the three flights of stairs and into the apartment.

In the living room, Roy turned on a lamp. She dropped onto the sofa. Edward stood in the doorway in his snowsuit and red galoshes. His nose was running. When she extended a hand toward him, he ran past her into his room.

Roy’s hands dangled at his side. His hair was wet and hanging onto his forehead. “Do you want a doctor?” he asked softly. “Or are you all right now? Lucy, did you hear me? Do you feel better?”

“Oh, you,” she said. “You hero.”

“Do you want me to open it out?” he asked, pointing to the sofa. “Do you want to rest? Just tell me.”

She pulled the cushion from behind her and threw it wildly at him. “You big war hero!”

The cushion struck his leg. He picked it up. “I was only keeping him entertained. Look, I always tell him—”

“I
know
you always tell him! Oh, I know, Roy—every Sunday of our lives you tell him! Because that’s all you can do! God knows you can’t
show
him!”

“Lucy, what did I do wrong now?”

“You idiot! You dolt! All
you
can show him is the carburetor in the car—and probably you get that wrong too! I saw you, Roy, in that brand-new Plymouth. To drive a new Plymouth—that was your biggest thrill of the year!”

“Well, no!”

“To sit behind the wheel of a new Sowerby car!”

“Jee—
zuz
, Lucy, Ellie asked if I wanted to drive, so I said yes. I mean, that’s no reason … Look, if you’re angry because I went over there … Look, we talked that over, Lucy—”

“You worm! Don’t you have any guts at all? Can’t you stand on your own two feet,
ever?
You sponge! You leech! You weak, hopeless, spineless, coward! You’ll never change—you don’t even
want
to change! You don’t even know what I
mean
by change! You stand there with your dumb mouth open! Because you have no backbone! None!” She grabbed the other cushion from behind her and heaved it toward his head. “Since the day we met!”

He batted down the cushion with his hands. “Look, now look—Eddie is right be—”

She charged off the sofa. “And no courage!” she cried. “And no determination! And no will of your own! If I didn’t tell you what to do, if I were to turn my back—if I didn’t every single rotten day of this rotten life … Oh, you’re not a man, and you never will be, and you don’t even
care!
” She was trying to hammer at his chest; first he pushed her hands down, then he protected himself with his forearms and elbows; then he just moved back, a step at a time.

“Lucy, come on, now, please. We’re not alone—”

But she pursued him. “You’re nothing! Less than nothing! Worse than nothing!”

He grabbed her two fists. “Lucy. Get control. Stop, please.”

“Get your hands off of me, Roy! Release me, Roy! Don’t you dare try to use your strength against me! Don’t you dare attempt violence!”

“I’m not attempting
anything!
”

“
I am a woman! Release my hands!
”

He did. He was crying.

“Oh,” she said, breathing hard, “how I despise you, Roy. Every word you speak, everything you do, or try to do, it’s awful. You’re nothing, and I will never forgive you—”

He put his hands over his eyes and wept.

“Never, never,” she said, “because you are beyond hope. Beyond endurance. You are beyond everything. You can’t be saved. You don’t even want to be.”

“Lucy, Lucy, no, that’s not true.”

“LaVoy,” she said disgustedly.

“—What?”

“LaVoy’s not the pansy, Roy. You are.”

“No, oh no.”

“Yes! You! Oh, go!” She dropped back onto the sofa. “Disappear. Leave me, leave me, just get out of my sight!”

She cried then, with such intensity that she felt her organs would be torn loose. Sounds that seemed to originate not in her body but in the corners of her skull emerged from her nostrils and her mouth. She pressed her eyes so tightly shut that between her cheekbones and her brow there was just a thin slit through which the hot tears ran. It began to seem she would be unable to stop crying. And she didn’t care. What else was there to do?

When she awoke the apartment was without light. She turned on the lamp. Who had turned it off?

“Roy?”

He had gone out.

She rushed to Edward’s room.

In the next moment she lost all sense of where she was. She could not get her mind to give her any information.
I am a freshman
.

No!

“Edward!”

She ran to the kitchen and turned on the light; then she was in his bedroom again. She opened the closet, but he was not hiding there. She opened his dresser to see … to see what?

He has taken him to a movie
. But it was nine o’clock at night.

He has taken him for something to eat
.

Back in the living room, she ran her hand over every
surface: no note, no nothing. In Edward’s bedroom she dropped to her knees. “Boo!” But he was not beneath the bed.

Of course! In the kitchen she dialed Hopkins’ studio.
He is showing him where he works, showing him what a big strong man he is. Showing him the kind of studio he could have in his own house if only Mommy wasn’t such a terrible person
. Well, she hoped—while the phone rang and rang—she hoped that he was also showing him where they were all supposed to live while their living and bed room became a business office, showing him what they were supposed to live on, too, while he waited for the customers to—

There was no one at the studio.

She searched the apartment again.
What am I looking for?
Then she telephoned Liberty Center. But the Bassarts were still at the Sowerbys’. The operator asked if she wished to place the call later, but she hung up without giving the Sowerbys’ number. Suppose it was a false alarm? Suppose he had only taken Edward for a hamburger, and the two of them returned just as Julian Sowerby picked up the phone?

She would just wait for him to come back and explain himself. To disappear without leaving a note! To take an exhausted little child out into a snowstorm at nine o’clock at night! There were cold things in the refrigerator; there was soup on the shelves. Don’t tell me it was to get him something to eat, Roy. It was to frighten me. It was to …

At ten-thirty Roy phoned to say that he had just arrived back in Liberty Center. She did not even wait for him to finish. She told him what he was to do. He said that Edward was fine—fine now, at any rate, but it had been one ghastly, horrible experience for him, and she ought to know it. She had to raise her voice to interrupt; once again, she made clear to him what he was to do, and instantly. But he just said she shouldn’t worry. He’d take care of everything at his end; maybe she ought to just worry about getting everything under control at her own. It was necessary now to shout at him to make him understand. He was to do what she told him. He
said he knew all about that, but the point was what she had done in the car, and what she had done afterward, what she had screamed at him, all in earshot of a small defenseless child. When she shouted again, he said that it would take the U.S. Marines to get him to return any child to a place where, to be honest about it, he really couldn’t stand it one day longer, as long as she kept on being the way she was. He was, to repeat, not returning any three-and-a-half-year-old to live one day more with a person who—he was sorry, but he was going to have to say it—

“Say what!”

“Who he hates like poison, that’s what!”

“Who hates who like poison, Roy?”

No answer.

“
Who
hates
who
like poison, Roy? You will not get away with that insinuation, I don’t care where you’re hiding! I demand you clarify what you just had the audacity to say to me—what you would never dare to say to my face, you crybaby! You coward!
Who
hates—”

“Hates
you!
”

“What? He loves me, you liar! You are lying! He loves me, and you return that child! Roy, do you hear me?
Return my child!
”

“I told you, Lucy, what he told me—
and I will not!
”

“I don’t believe you! Not for a single second do I believe—”

“Well, you better! All the way up here, he cried his little heart out—”

“I don’t believe you!”

“ ‘I hate Mommy, her face was all black.’ That’s how he cried to me, Lucy!”

“
You’re lying, Roy!
”

“Then why does he lock himself in the toilet? Why does he run away from his dinner every other night—”

“
He doesn’t!
”

“He did!”

“Because of you!” she shouted. “Not doing your job!”

“No, Lucy, because of
you!
Because of your screaming,
hateful, bossy, hateful, heartless guts! Because he never wants to see your ugly, heartless face again, and neither do I! Never!”

“Roy, you are my husband! You have responsibilities! You get into that car this instant—you start out right
now
—and whether you drive all night—”

But at the other end, there was a click; the connection was broken. Either Roy had hung up, or someone had taken the phone away and hung up for him.

T
he last bus out of Fort Kean got her to Liberty Center just before one in the morning. The snow was barely drifting down, and there was no one to be seen on Broadway. She had to wait at the back of Van Harn’s for a taxi to take her up to The Grove.

She used the time as she had used the hour of the dark trip north: rehearsing once again what she would say. What was demanded of her was now clear enough; the scene to be enacted became vague only when she had to imagine what she would do if Roy refused to drive her and Edward back to Fort Kean. To stay at Daddy Will’s till morning was out of the question. That assistance she could live without. When hadn’t she? Nor would she stay overnight with the Bassarts, though the chance that she would even be invited to was very slight indeed. Had her in-laws had even a grain of loyalty to her, the instant Roy arrived back in town they would have demanded some explanation of him; they were at the Sowerbys’, they could have gotten on the phone with her themselves, they could have intervened in behalf of a mother and a child, even if the husband happened in this instance to be a son. There were principles to be honored, values to respect, that went beyond blood relationships; but apparently they had no more knowledge of what it meant to be human than did her
own family. None of them had so much as raised a finger to stop Roy in this reckless, ridiculous adventure, not even the high-minded high school teacher himself. No, she could not be innocent, not where people like this were concerned: she knew perfectly well that when Roy pronounced himself unable to undertake a second trip to Fort Kean at one in the morning, his parents would join with the Sowerbys in supporting him. And she knew too, that if she allowed him to stay behind while she and Edward returned alone to Fort Kean, then he would never return to live with them again.

And how she wished that she could permit that to be. Had he not proved to her that his soul was an abyss, not just of selfishness, of mindlessness, but of heartless cruelty too? Try as she would to believe him capable of a deeper devotion, deceive herself as she might by believing him to be “sweet” and “kind,” a good and gentle man, the truth about his character was now glaringly apparent. There was a point beyond which one could not go in believing in the potential for good in another human being, and after four nightmarish years she had finally reached it. With all her heart she wished that she and Edward might return to Fort Kean, leaving Roy behind. Let him return to Mommy and Daddy and Auntie and Uncle, to his milk and his cookies and his endless, hopeless, childish dreaming. If only it were a month ago—if only there were just herself and Edward, then Roy, for all she cared, could disappear forever. She was young and strong; she knew what work was, she knew the meaning of sacrifice and struggle, and was not afraid of either. In only a few months Edward could begin nursery school; she could get work then, in a store, in a restaurant, in a factory—wherever the pay was highest, it did not matter to her how strenuous was the labor itself. She would support herself and Edward, and Roy could go off and live in his parents’ house, sleeping till noon, opening “a studio” in the garage, clipping pictures from magazines, pasting them up in scrapbooks—he could flounder and fail however he liked, but without her and Edward suffering the ugly consequences.
Yes, she would get work, she would earn what they needed, and cut that monster—for who but a monster could have said on the phone those terrible things he had said to her?—cut him out of their lives, forever.