When She Was Good (31 page)

“Feel,” he said, putting his fingertips to her forehead. “What a winter. I’m telling you, this is just what it was like up there.”

“Where?”

“The Aleutians. But at four in the afternoon. Can you imagine?”

He sat beside her and put one hand on her hair. “You’re not angry at me about the book, are you?”

“No.”

“Because of course I’m not even going to do it, Lucy. I mean, how could I?”

He got back under the blankets. Half an hour must have passed. “I can’t sleep. Can you?”

“What?”

“Can you sleep?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well, is anything the matter?”

She did not answer.

“You want something? You want a glass of milk?”

“No.”

He made his way across the dark living room into the kitchen.

When he returned he sat in the chair near the bed. “Want a Hydrox?” he asked.

“No.”

A car went ticking through the snowy street.

“Wow,” he said.

She said nothing.

He asked if she was still awake.

She did not answer. “Twenty-two,” she was thinking, “and this will be my whole life. This. This. This. This.”

He went into Edward’s room. When he came back, he said that Edward was sleeping like a charm. That was the great thing about kids. Lights out, and they’re off in dreamland before you can count to three.

Silence.

Boy, wouldn’t it be something if some day they had a little girl of their own.

A what?

“A little girl,” he said.

He got up and went into the kitchen and came back with the milk carton in his hand. He poured all that remained into his glass and drank it down.

As long as he could remember, he said, he had dreamed of having a little daughter. Did she know that? And he had always known what he would call her, too. Linda. He assured Lucy that he had come upon the name long before the song “Linda” had gotten popular. Still, whenever he used to hear Buddy Clark singing it on the jukebox, back in the PX up in the Aleutians, he used to think about being married and having a family, and about this little daughter he would have some day who would be called Linda Bassart. Linda Sue. “Isn’t that
pretty? I mean, forget the song. Isn’t it, just for itself? And it goes with Bassart. Try it … You awake?”

“Yes.”

“Linda—Sue—Bassart,” he said. “I mean, it’s not too fancy, on the one hand, and yet it’s not too plain either. Edward, too, is sort of right in the middle there, which is what I like.”

Another car. Silence.

He got up and looked out of the window. “Miss Linda … Sue … Bassart. Pretty good, ’eh what?”

… Till that moment, to make him a proper father to his little boy had been so great a struggle that she had never once thought of a second child. But in that deep winter silence, listening to what he had said, and to the tone in which he said it, she thought that maybe at long last he wasn’t mouthing words for the sole purpose of pleasing her. He seemed not to be pretending; she could hear it in his voice, that he was expressing a real feeling, a real desire. Maybe he really did want a daughter. Maybe he always had.

The whole next day she could not put out of her mind what Roy had said to her the previous night. It was all she could think of.

When he came home in the evening, when, as usual, he swung Edward up over his head, she thought, “He wants a daughter. He wants a second child. Can it be? Has he actually changed? Has he finally turned into a man?”

And so it was that in the early hours of the following morning, when Roy came rolling over on top of her, Lucy decided it was no longer necessary to continue to use protection. After Edward was born, the obstetrician had suggested that she might want to be fitted for a contraceptive device, if she did not already have one. Instantly she had said yes, when she understood that henceforth their fate would no longer be in Roy’s hands; never again would she be the victim of his incompetence and stupidity. But now he had told her that to have a daughter was one of his oldest desires. And though it had not sounded as though he had simply been trying to please her with his words, how would she ever know
unless she gave him the chance to prove himself sincere and truthful?

In the next few weeks Roy did not mention Linda Sue again, nor did she. In the dead of the night, however, she would be awakened by a hand or a leg falling upon her; and then his long body working against her small frame—or, if he was not wholly conscious, against her nightgown. This was how their love was made that February, and there was nothing extraordinary about it; it was how it had been made for years. Only now, while he pushed and thrust against her in the dark, she looked beyond his shoulder at the snow steadily blowing down, knowing that very shortly she was going to be pregnant for the second time in her life. And it would be different this time; there would be no one they would have to plead with, or argue with, nor would they have to argue with each other. They were married now, and there were no families upon whom either of them was dependent in any way. This time it would be something that Roy himself had said he wanted. And this time, she just knew, the child would be a girl.

Suddenly her illusion of an endlessly unhappy life just disappeared. All the heaviness and sadness and melancholy seemed to have been drawn out of her overnight. Could it be? A new Lucy? A new Roy? A new life? One afternoon, walking home with Edward’s mittened hand in hers, and the sled rasping behind them over the cleared walks, she began to sing the silly song that Daddy Will had taught her little boy.

“ ‘Poor old Michael Finnegan,’ ” he said cautiously, as though nonplused she should even know it …

“But Daddy Will told you, I used to sing when I was a child. I was a child once too. You know that.”

“Yes?”

“Of course. Everyone was a child once. Even Daddy Will!”

He shrugged.

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and then he began to smirk, and by the time they got to the house, he was singing with his Mamma—

Really, she could not remember ever having been as happy as this in her entire life. The sensation she began to have was that the awful past had finally fallen away, and that she was living suddenly in her own future. It seemed to her that great spans of time were passing as the month wore down to Washington’s Birthday, and then to that final Sunday when they drove Edward up to visit the grandparents and great-grandparents in Liberty Center.

After dinner Roy went outside to take pictures of Edward helping his grandfather break up a slick patch of ice in front of the garage doors. Lucy could see the three of them in the driveway, Roy telling Lloyd where to stand so that the light and the shadows fell right, and Lloyd telling Roy that he was standing where he had to in order to get the job done, and Edward plunging his red galoshes into the drifts at the side of the drive. She stood at the sink watching the scene outside and intermittently listening to Alice Bassart’s stream of chatter; they were finishing the dinner dishes, Alice washing and Lucy drying.

Ellie Sowerby was home for the weekend, and all Alice could seem to talk about was the trouble Irene was having with her daughter. Lucy wondered if the conversation was primarily intended to irritate her. She and her mother-in-law hardly had what could be called a warm and loving relationship; no girl who had taken Alice Bassart’s big boy out of the house could have been her pal to begin with, but recently there had come to be another grievance. Whatever the resentment felt toward Lucy because of the marriage itself, her refusal to have anything to do with Alice’s sister and brother-in-law had only made things worse. Not that Alice ever came right out with it; that was not her little way.

But what difference did Alice Bassart make to her today? Or even the Sowerbys? They were all a part of that past that seemed to have dissolved away to nothing. That past and these people had no power over her any longer. She had
made it through the month without her period. There was only the future to think about now.

So, with no real discomfort and even with a certain remote curiosity, she listened to the Eleanor Sowerby story, bits and pieces of which she had been hearing since Ellie had graduated from Northwestern in June. With three friends Ellie had spent the summer at a dude ranch in Wyoming, where one of the girls’ families lived. Now she was down in Chicago, with the same three girls, crammed into what was, according to Ellie, a “crazy” apartment on the Near North Side—just off Rush Street, or “Lush” Street, as Skippy Skelton, a roommate of Ellie’s, called it. Of course Lucy already knew that “this Roger” (the second young man at Northwestern to give Ellie a fraternity pin) “this Roger,” to whom she was to have been engaged following their graduation, had suddenly decided in the last semester of their senior year that he really didn’t like Ellie as much as he thought he had. One day, out of the blue, he dropped her; and so unexpectedly, so cruelly, that Irene had had to rush all the way down to Evanston and stay for a whole week while Ellie got her bearings again. The family had only given their consent to the idea of a dude ranch way off in Wyoming in the hope that it would help get her mind off what had happened. As for this Roger, said Alice Bassart, he must have been quite a person. Do you know when he asked to have his precious pin back? A week to the day after having spent a perfectly lovely Easter vacation in Liberty Center as Ellie’s house guest!

But despite his cruelty toward her, Ellie was beginning to bounce back at last; beginning to understand how much better off she was with a person such as this Roger out of her life entirely. And she wasn’t having the crying sieges any more, which was a relief to them all. It was the crying that had almost made it necessary for Irene to get on a plane and fly out to Wyoming. But Skippy Skelton had apparently turned out to be a very strong young lady, and had given Ellie some kind of talking-to that made her stop feeling so sorry for herself; and now Ellie was so busy down in Chicago that she just
didn’t have the time any longer to spend whole days on her bed, weeping into her pillow. She was working as a receptionist at some kind of advertising research firm; and the people there were “fabulous”—she had never met so many “brainy” men before in her life. She hadn’t even known that they existed. What she meant by that, they weren’t quite sure as yet. Irene, frankly, was nervous, knowing how important it was for Ellie to get through the coming year without any kind of shock that would cause her another emotional setback. And Julian didn’t at all like the sound of who it was she might be hanging around with down there. As he understood it, they had a university down there full of so-called brainy men, half of them Commies.

And to make matters even worse, Ellie just kept blooming and blossoming: each time you saw her she was more beautiful than the last. She had filled out so very nicely, and though she now saw some reason to wear her hair down into her face so that you could hardly even see those wonderful dimples, she was still the kind of girl who unfortunately attracted boys to her just by walking down a street minding her own business. But boys wouldn’t be so bad; it was these brainy men they were worried about. She was even more of a fashion plate than she had been as a child—to walk around in Chicago a person apparently needed twenty-four pairs of shoes, said Alice—and what worried the Sowerbys was that a man without scruples would see her, make up to her, and then take advantage of her, with no regard for her feelings whatsoever. Ellie was still on the rebound from this Roger, and what with her sweet, generous, trusting nature, she might easily fall head over heels in love with somebody who would break her heart a second time in a row. The Sowerbys were particularly upset now because it turned out that Skippy, who had seemed to be such a good influence on Ellie, was going out with a thirty-seven-year-old man who wasn’t living with his wife—and who was thinking of taking Skippy (age twenty-two) and going off with her to hide away in Spain for about ten years; maybe even forever. Why Ellie was home for the weekend was to
talk over with her parents the kind of a girl this Skippy Skelton had turned out to be.

A few minutes later they were all in the living room when Ellie drove up in her mother’s car.

Lucy didn’t even have time to turn to Roy to ask if this visit had been planned: her old friend was up the walk, up the steps, and into the house.

In the first instant Ellie seemed somehow taller than Lucy remembered her. But that was an illusion, created partly by her hair—she had let it grow long and thick, like a kind of mane—and partly by her coat, which was made of some honey-colored fur and had a belt pulled tight around the middle. How dramatic. She stepped into the living room as onto a stage. Nothing Lucy could see indicated that Eleanor was a person recovering from a disaster; she did not look as though she even lived in a world where disaster was possible.

Lloyd Bassart had opened the door and so was the first to be embraced. “Uncle Lloyd! Hi!” and Ellie got him directly on the lips. Lucy could not recall ever having seen anyone kiss Lloyd Bassart on the lips before. Then Ellie’s hair, cold and crackling, was against her own cheek. “Hi!” and then, Ellie was looking down at Edward: “Hey! Hi! Remember me? No? I’m your cousin, do you know that? Aren’t I his cousin? I’m your second cousin Eleanor, and you’re my second cousin Edward. Hi, second cousin!”

The child stood by Roy’s chair, his head pressed against his father’s knee. In only a few minutes, however, she had coaxed him onto her lap, where she let him cuddle up on the fur coat—which Ellie said was only otter, though the collar was mink. Edward slid his hands into her fur-lined leather gloves and everybody laughed; they fit him clear up to the elbow.

When Lucy reminded Roy that it was time to visit her family, he said that Ellie wanted to know if they would all come over to her house first. He had followed Lucy into the kitchen, to which she had retreated, offering the excuse that she wanted a glass of water. If she had to hear the name Skippy Skelton one more time, she would go out of her mind.
Skippy was somebody you didn’t have to worry about. Skippy had been on the Dean’s List every semester but her last at Northwestern, and then she had just stopped caring about grades. Skippy had no intention of running off to Spain with the kind of phony Greg had turned out to be. Spain, in fact, had been a slight exaggeration of Eleanor’s. She didn’t know why she had said it, except that speaking to your mother long distance once a week, you finally ran out of things to say. Greg was back now with his wife and children, so there was nothing to fret about, at least where Skippy was concerned. You didn’t have to worry about Skippy, she could just joke herself out of a tight situation, that’s the kind of person Skippy was. It was Skippy herself who had told Greg that he should scoot on back to his family, once she had found out there were three little kiddies involved. Now Skippy was dating a really “hip” guy who thought that Ellie was a jerk to be wasting her talents behind a receptionist’s desk for fifty dollars a week … Which was why Ellie was home for the weekend. Her parents might think she had made the trip up to explain about Skippy, but actually why she was here was to tell them that through Skippy’s friend she had gotten an introduction to Martita. They didn’t know who Martita was? Well, she just happened to have been the most important model in America before the war. Now she was retired and ran the only
real
agency in Chicago. Ellie’s news was that in a matter of a few weeks she would be leaving the receptionist job to plunge headlong into a new career. “Fashion model!” she said. “Me!”