When She Was Good (6 page)

“Well,” said Berta, “Mr. Upshot himself.”

The doorbell rang. Once.

Willard turned to Myra. “Did you tell him to come? Myra, did you know he was coming?”

“No. No. I swear it.”

Whitey rang once again.

“… It’s Sunday,” explained Myra when no one moved to open the door.

“And?” demanded Willard.

“Maybe he has something to tell us. Something to say. It’s Sunday. He’s all alone.”

“Mother,” cried Lucy, “he hit you. With a belt!”

Now Whitey began to rap on the glass of the front door.

Myra, flustered, said to her daughter, “And is that what Alice Bassart is going around telling people?”

“Isn’t that what
happened?
”

“No!” said Myra, covering her blackened eye. “It was an accident—that he didn’t even mean. I don’t
know
what happened. But it’s over!”

“Once, Mother, just once, protect yourself!”

“—All I know,” Berta was saying, “are you listening to me, Willard? All I know is that it sounds to me as if he is planning to put his fist through that fifteen-dollar glass.”

But Willard was saying, “Now first off, I want everyone here to calm down. The fellow has been away three whole days, something that has never happened before—”

“Oh, but I’ll bet he’s found a warm corner somewhere, Daddy Will—with a barstool in it.”

“I know he hasn’t!” said Myra.

“Where was he then, Mother, the Salvation Army?”

“Now, Lucy, now wait a minute,” said Willard. “This is nothing to shout about. As far as we know he has not missed a day of work. As for his nights, he has been sleeping at the Bill Bryants’, on their sofa—”

“Oh, you
people!
” Lucy cried, and was out of the room and into the front hallway. The rapping at the glass stopped. For a moment there was not a sound; but then the bolt snapped shut, and Lucy shouted, “Never! Do you understand that? Never!”

“No,” moaned Myra. “No.”

Lucy came back into the room.

Myra said, “… What—what did you do?”

“Mother, the man is beyond hope! Beyond everything!”

“A-men,” said Berta.

“Oh, you!” said Lucy, turning on her grandmother. “You don’t even know what I’m saying!”

“Willard!” said Berta sharply.

“Lucy!” said Willard.

“Oh
no
,” cried Myra, for in the meantime she had rushed past them into the hallway. “Duane!”

But he was already running down the street. By the time Myra had unlocked the door and rushed out on the porch, he had turned a corner and was out of sight. Gone.

Till now. Lucy had locked him out, and Whitey had watched her do it to him; through the glass he had seen his pregnant eighteen-year-old daughter driving shut the bolt against his
entering. And had never dared return after that. Until now, with nearly five years gone and Lucy dead … He must be waiting down in that station twenty minutes already. Unless he had become impatient, and decided to go back where he came from; unless he had decided that maybe this time he ought to disappear for good.

—The pain shot down Willard’s right leg, from the hip to the toe, that sharp sizzling line of pain. Cancer! Bone cancer! There—again! Yesterday too he had felt it, searing down his calf and into his foot. And the day before. Yes, they would take him to the doctor, X-ray him, put him to bed, tell him lies, give him painkillers, and one day when it got too excruciating, ship him off to the hospital and watch him waste away … But the pain settled in now, like something bubbling over a low flame. No, it was not cancer of the bone. It was only his sciatica.

But what did he expect sitting outside like this? The shoulders of his jacket were covered with snow; so were the toes of his boots. The first sheen of winter glowed on the paths and stones of the cemetery. The wind was down now. It was a cold, black night … and he was thinking, yes sir, he would have to pay attention to that sciatica, no more treating it like a joke. The smart thing was probably to take to a wheelchair for a month or so, so as to get the pressure off the sciatic nerve itself. That was Dr. Eglund’s advice two years ago, and maybe it wasn’t such a silly idea as it had seemed. A nice long rest. Throw an afghan over his knees, settle down into a nice sunny corner with the paper and the radio and his pipe, and whatever happened in the house, let it just roll right by him. Just concentrate on getting that sciatic nerve licked once and for all. Surely that is a right you have at seventy years of age, to wheel yourself off into another room …

Or he could pretend not to hear everything; let on that he was getting a little deaf. Who’d know the difference? Yes, that might well be a way of solving the whole thing, without bringing a wheelchair into the bargain. Just look blank, shrug your shoulders and walk away. In the months to come he
could pretend every once in a while to be slipping some with his faculties. Yes sir, just have to make their way without him. Welcome to use his house for a while, that was fine with him, but beyond that—well, he just wasn’t all there in the head, you know. Maybe to make his point so that it stuck, he ought to, on purpose to be sure, and knowing exactly what he was doing all the while, and not in Berta’s direction of course, do as his sad old friend John Erwin had begun unfortunately to do, and wet the bed.

“But why? Why should I be senile? Why be off my head when that is not the case!” He jumped to his feet. “Why be getting pneumonia and worrying myself sick—when all I did was good!” The fear of death, horrible, hateful death, caused him to bring his lids tight down over his eyes. “Good!” he cried. “Unto others!” And down the hill he went, shedding snow from his jacket and his cap, while his old, aching legs carried him as fast as they could out of the graveyard.

Not until he was past the cemetery road and under the street lamps of South Water Street did Willard’s heartbeat begin to resume something resembling a natural rhythm. Just because winter was beginning again did not mean that he was never going to see the spring. He was not only going to live till then, he was alive
right now
. And so was everybody shopping and driving in cars; problems or not, they are alive! Alive! We are all alive! Oh, what had he been doing in a cemetery? At this hour, in this weather! Come on, enough gloomy, morbid, unnecessary, last-minute thinking. There was plenty more to think about, and not all of it bad either. Just think how Whitey will laugh when he hears how in the middle of the night, as though in judgment of itself, the building that used to house Earl’s Dugout caved right in, roof first, and had to be demolished. And so what if Stanley’s is under new management? Whitey had as much disdain of a low-down saloon as anybody when he was being himself—and that was a good deal more often than it might appear, too, when you were purposely setting out to remember the low points in his
life. You could do that with anybody, think only about their low points … And wait till he sees the new shopping center, wait till he takes his first walk down Broadway—sure, they could do that together, and Willard could point out to him how the Elks had been remodeled—

“Oh hell, the fellow is nearly fifty—what else can I even
do?
” He was speaking aloud now, as he drove on into town. “There is a job waiting for him over in Winnisaw. That has all been arranged, and with his say-so, with his wanting it, with his
asking
for it. As for the moving in, that is absolutely temporary. Believe me, I am too old for that other stuff. What we are planning is January the first … Oh, look,” he cried to the dead, “I am not God in heaven! I did not make the world! I cannot predict the future! Damn it anyway, he is her husband—that she loves, whether we like it or not!”

Instead of parking at the back of Van Harn’s, he pulled up in front so as to take the long way to the waiting room, so as to have just another thirty seconds of reflection. He entered the store, slamming his wet cap against his knee. “And most likely,” he thought, “most likely won’t be there anyway.” Without coming into the waiting room, he set himself to peer inside. “Most likely I have sat up there for no good reason at all. In the end he probably did not even have it in him to come back.”

And there was Whitey, sitting on a bench, looking down at his shoes. His hair was now quite gray; so was the mustache. He crossed and recrossed his legs, so that Willard saw the undersides of his shoes, pale and smooth. A little suitcase, also new, sat beside him on the floor.

“So,” said Willard to himself, “he did it. Actually got on a bus and came. After all that has happened, after all the misery he has caused, he has had the nerve to get on a bus and then get off it and to wait here half an hour, expecting to be picked up … Oh, you idiot!” he thought, and unseen yet, glared at his middle-aged son-in-law, his new shoes, his new suitcase—oh, sure, new man too! “You dumb cluck! You scheming, lying, thieving ignoramus! You weak, washed-out
lushhead, sucking the life’s blood from every human heart there is! You no-good low-life weakling! So what if you can’t help it! So what if you don’t mean it—”

“—Duane,” said Willard, stepping forward, “How you doing, Duane?”

W
hen young Roy Bassart came out of the service in the summer of 1948, he didn’t know what to do with his future, so he sat around for six months listening to people talk about it. He would drop his long skinny frame into a big club chair in his uncle’s living room and instantly slide half out of it, so that his Army shoes and Army socks and khaki trousers were all obstacles to cross over if you wanted to go by, as his cousin Eleanor and her friend Lucy often did when he was visiting. He would sit there absolutely motionless, his thumbs hooked around the beltless loops of his trousers and his chin tipped down onto his long tubular chest, and when asked if he was listening to what was being said to him, he would nod his head without even raising his glance from his shirt buttons. Or sometimes, with his bright, fair face, with those blue eyes as clear as day, he would look up at whoever was advising him or questioning him, and see them through a frame that he made with his fingers.

In the Army, Roy had developed an interest in drawing, and profiles were his specialty. He was excellent on noses (the bigger the better), good on ears, good on hair, good on certain kinds of chins, and had bought a manual to teach himself the secret of drawing a mouth, which was his weak point. He had even begun to think that he ought to go ahead and try to
become a professional artist. He realized it was no easy row to hoe, but maybe the time had come in life for him to tackle something hard instead of settling for the easiest thing at hand.

It was his plan to become a professional artist that he had announced upon his return to Liberty Center late in August; he had barely set down his duffel bag in the living room when the first argument began.

You would have thought he was a kid returning home from Camp Gitche Gumee instead of the Aleutian Islands. If he had forgotten in the time away what life had been like for him during his last year of high school, it did not take Lloyd and Alice Bassart more than half an hour to refresh his recollection. The argument, which went on for days, consisted for the most part of his parents saying they had had experiences he hadn’t, and Roy saying that now he had had experiences they hadn’t. After all, it just might be, he said, that his opinion counted for something—particularly since what they were discussing was his career.

To make a point, in fact, he spent the whole of his third day home copying a girl’s profile off a matchbook cover. He worked it over and over and over, taking just a quick break for lunch, and only after an entire afternoon behind the locked door of his bedroom did he believe he had gotten it right. He addressed three different envelopes after dinner, until he was satisfied with the lettering, and then sent the picture off to the art school, which was in Kansas City, Missouri—walking all the way downtown to the post office to be sure that it made the evening mail. When a return letter announced that Mr. Roy Basket had won a five-hundred-dollar correspondence course for only forty-nine fifty, he tended to agree with his Uncle Julian that it was some kind of clip joint, and did not pursue the matter any further.

Just the same, he had proved the point he had set out to prove, and right off. When he had been called up by the draft board for his two years’ service, his father had said that he hoped a little military discipline would do something toward maturing his son. He himself seemed willing to admit bungling
the job. Well, the way things turned out, Roy had matured, and plenty, too. But it wasn’t discipline that had done it; it was, to put it bluntly, being away from them. In high school he may have been willing to slide through with C’s and C-minuses, when with a little application of his intelligence (
Alice Bassart:
Which you have, Roy, in abundance), he could easily have had straight B’s—probably even A’s, if he had wanted them. But the point he wished to make was that he was no longer that C student, and no longer would be treated like him either. If he put his mind to a job he could do it, and do it well. The only problem now was which job it was going to be. At the age of twenty, nobody had to tell him that it was high time to begin thinking about becoming a man. Because he was thinking about it, and plenty, don’t worry.

He continued to work on his own out of the art manual, in exasperation moving on to the neck and the shoulders, after four days of going from bad to worse with the mouth. Though he by no means relinquished his first choice of being a professional artist, he was willing to meet his family halfway and at least listen to whatever suggestions they might have. He had to admit being tempted by Uncle Julian’s suggestion that he come to work for him and learn the laundromat business from the ground up. What was particularly appealing about the idea was that the people in the towns along the river would see him driving around in Julian’s pickup truck and think of him as some punk kid; and the ladies who managed the laundromats would think of him as the boss’s nephew, and suppose his life was just a bed of roses—when in actuality his real work would only begin at night, after everyone was asleep, and behind his bedroom door he stayed awake till dawn, perfecting his talent.