When She Was Good (7 page)

What wasn’t too appealing was the idea of using family as a crutch, and right at the outset. He couldn’t bear the thought of hearing for the rest of his life, “Of course, it was Julian gave him his start …” But of more significance was the damage that accepting something like this could do to his individuality. Not only would he never really respect himself
if he just stepped into a job and rose solely on the basis of personal privilege, but how would he ever realize his own potential if he was going to be treated like one of those rich kids who were just coddled up the ladder of success their whole life long?

And there was Julian to consider. He said he was altogether serious about the offer, provided Roy really wanted to work the long hard hours he would demand of him. Well, the long hard hours didn’t bother him. A really vicious mess sergeant had once, just out of meanness, kept him on KP for seventeen consecutive hours scrubbing pots and pans, and after that experience Roy realized he could do just about anything. So once he had made up his mind about the direction his life was going to take, he had every intention—to throw Julian’s language right back at him—of working his balls into the ground.

But what if he went in with Julian, started taking a salary, and then decided to go off in September to the Art Institute in Chicago; or even to art school in New York, which was by no means impossible? He was giving his parents’ objection every consideration (whether they appreciated that or not), but if he finally did decide in favor of professional artist as a career, wouldn’t he have wasted not only his time, but Julian’s as well? Probably to his uncle, whose affection he valued, he would wind up seeming ungrateful—and maybe that would even be sort of true. Ingratitude was something he had to guard against in himself. Though he was sure his classmates at school and his buddies in the service thought of him as easygoing and generous—his first sergeant used to sometimes call him Steppin’ Fetchit—he had been told he had a tendency to be selfish. Not that everybody didn’t have one, of course, but certain people had a way of exaggerating things all out of proportion, and he just didn’t feel like giving an ounce of support to a suspicion about him which it was actually unfair for anybody (particularly a person’s own father) to hold in the first place.

Moreover, what he had a real taste for, following the monotony and tedium of the preceding months, was adventure, and you couldn’t really expect that the Laundromat
business would be packed with thrills, or even particularly interesting, to be frank about it. As for the security angle, money really didn’t matter that much to him. He now had two thousand dollars in savings and separation pay, plus the G.I. Bill, and anyway he had no ambition to be a millionaire. That’s why, when his father told him that artists wind up living in garrets, Roy was able to say, “What’s so wrong with that? What do you think a garret is? It’s an attic. My own room used to be the attic, you know,” a fact Mr. Bassart couldn’t easily dispute.

What he had a taste for was adventure, something to test himself against, some way to discover just how much of an individual he really was. And if it wasn’t the life of an artist, maybe it was some kind of a job in a foreign country, where to the natives he would be a stranger to be judged only by what he did and said, and not by what they knew about him from before … But saying such things was often only another way of saying you wanted to be a child again. Aunt Irene made that point, and he was willing to admit to himself that she could be right. He was always willing to listen to what ideas his Aunt Irene had, because (1) she usually said what she had to say in private and wasn’t just talking to impress people (a tendency of Uncle Julian’s); (2) she didn’t butt in, or raise her voice, when you argued back or disagreed (his father’s courteous approach); and (3) she didn’t ever respond with sheer hysterics to some idea or other he had most likely thrown out just to hear how it sounded (as his mother had a habit of doing).

His mother and his Aunt Irene were sisters, but two people couldn’t have been more different in terms of calmness. For example, when he said that maybe what he ought to do was leave Liberty Center with a pack on his back and see what the rest of the country had to offer, before making any major choice he would later be stuck with, Aunt Irene registered some interest in the idea. All his mother could do was push the old panic button, as they used to say in the service. Instantly she started to tell him that he had just returned from two years
away (which of course he didn’t know), and to tell him that he ought to make up his mind to go to the state university (and use that intelligence of his “as God meant you to use it, Roy”) and then finally to accuse him of not listening to a word she said.

But he was listening, all right; even sunk down in that big chair, he took in all her objections, more or less. Those she had raised previously a hundred times or more he felt he had the right to tune out on, but he got the drift of her remarks, more or less. She wanted him to be a good little boy and do what he was told; she wanted him to be just like everybody else. And really, right there—in his mother’s words and tone—was reason enough for him to be out of town by nightfall. Maybe that’s what he ought to do, just shove off and not look back-once he had made up his mind what part of the country he ought to see first. There was always a sack for him in Seattle, Washington, where his best Army buddy, Willoughby, lived (and Willoughby’s kid sister, whom Roy was supposed to be fixed up with). Another good buddy, Hendricks, lived in Texas; his father owned a ranch, where Roy could probably work for his grub if he ever ran short of loot. And then there was Boston. It was supposed to be beautiful in Boston. It was the most historic city in America. “I might just try Boston,” he thought, even as his mother went gaily on losing her senses. “Yes sir, I might just pick up and head East.”

But to be honest, he could use a few more months of easy living before starting in roughing it again, if that’s what he finally decided it was best for him to do. He had spent sixteen months in that black hole of Calcutta (as they called it), eight to five every day in that scintillating motor-pool office—and then those nights. If he ever saw another ping-pong ball in his
life
 … and the weather! It made Liberty Center seem like a jungle in South America. Wind and snow and that big gray sky that was about as inspiring to look at as a washed blackboard. And that mud. And that chow! And that narrow, soggy, undersized son-of-a-bitching (really) excuse for a bed! Actually he
owed
it to himself not to go anywhere until he
had caught up on all the rest he had probably lost on that g.d. bed—and gotten one or two of his taste buds back to functioning too. After an experience like that he surely couldn’t say he minded having breakfast served to him in a nice bright kitchen every morning, and having a room of his own again where everything didn’t have to be squared away with a plumb bob, or taking as long as he wanted (or just
needed
) in the john, with the door closed and nobody else doing his business at either elbow. It felt
all
right, he could tell you, to eat a breakfast that wasn’t all dishwater and cardboard, and then to settle down in the living room with the
Leader
, and read it at your leisure, without somebody pulling the sports page right up out of your hands.

As for his mother chattering away at him nonstop from the kitchen, he wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t understand that why she was concerned for him was because he happened to be her son. She loved him. Simple. Sometimes when he finished with the paper he would come into the kitchen where she was working, and no matter what silly thing she was saying, put his arms around her and tell her what a good kid she was. Sometimes he’d even dance a few steps with her, singing some popular song into her ear. It didn’t cost him anything, and as far as she was concerned, it was seventh heaven.

She really meant well, his mother, even if some of her pampering ways were a little embarrassing at this stage of the game. Like sending him that package of toilet-seat liners. That’s what he had received at mail call one day: a hundred large white tissues, each in the shape of a doughnut, which she had seen advertised in a medical magazine at the doctor’s office, and which he was supposed to sit on—in the Army. At first he actually thought of showing them to his first sergeant, who had been wounded in the back at Anzio during World War II. But thinking that Sergeant Hickey might misunderstand, and instead of making fun of his mother, make fun of him, he had strolled around back of the mess hall late that night and furtively dumped them into a can of frozen garbage, careful first to remove and destroy the card she had enclosed.
It read, “Roy, please use these. Not everyone is from a clean home.”

Which was a perfect case of her meaning well, but not having the slightest idea that he was a grownup whom you couldn’t
do
things like that to any more. Nevertheless, there had been times up in Adak when he missed her, and even missed his father, and felt about them as he had in those years before they had started misunderstanding every word that came out of his mouth. He would forget about all the things they said he did wrong, and all the things he said they did wrong, and think that actually he was a pretty lucky guy to have behind him a family so concerned for his well-being. There was a guy in his barracks who had been brought up in Boys Town, Nebraska, and though Roy had a lot of respect for him, he always had to feel sorry for all that he had missed, not having a family of his own. His name was Kurtz, and even though he had the kind of bad skin Roy didn’t exactly like to have to look at at mealtime, he often found himself inviting him to come to visit in Liberty Center (after they all got sprung from this prison) and taste his Mom’s cooking. Kurtz said he sure wouldn’t mind. Nor would any of them have minded, for that matter: one of the big events in the barracks was the arrival of what came to be known as “Mother Bassart’s goodies.” When Roy wrote and told his mother that she was the second most popular pinup girl in the barracks, after Jane Russell, she began to send two boxes of cookies in each package, one for Roy to keep for himself, and another for the boys who were his friends.

As for Miss Jane Russell, her latest film had been banned by a court order from the movie house in Winnisaw, a fact which Alice Bassart hoped Roy would take to heart.
That
Roy read to Sergeant Hickey, and they both got a good laugh out of it.

In the months, then, after his discharge, Roy made it his business first to catch up on his sleep, and second to catch up on his food. Every morning about quarter to ten—well after his father had disappeared for the day—he would come down in khakis and a T-shirt to a breakfast of two kinds of juice,
two eggs, four slices of bacon, four slices of toast, a mound of Bing cherry preserves, a mound of marmalade, and coffee—which, just to shock his mother, who never had seen him take anything at breakfast but milk, he called “hot joe” or “hot java.” Some mornings he downed a whole pot of hot joe, and he could see that actually she didn’t know whether to be scandalized by what he was drinking or thrilled by the amount. She liked to do her duty by him when it came to food, and since it didn’t cost him anything, he let her.

“And you know what else I drink, Alice?” he’d say, smacking his gut with his palm as he rose from the table. It didn’t make the same noise as when Sergeant Hickey, who weighed two twenty-five, did it, but it was a good sound just the same.

“Roy,” she’d say, “don’t be smart. Are you drinking whiskey?”

“Oh, just a few snorts now and then, Alice.”

“
Roy—
”

Which was where—if he saw she was really taking it all in—he might come up, put his arms around her and say, “You’re a good kid, Alice, but don’t believe everything you hear.” And then he’d give her a big, loud kiss on the forehead, sure it would instantly brighten not only her mood, but the whole morning of housework and shopping. And he was right—it usually did. After all was said and done, he and Alice had a good relationship.

Then a look at the paper from cover to cover; then back into the kitchen for a quick glass of milk. Standing beside the refrigerator, he would drink it down in two long gulps, then close his eyes while the steely sensation of the cold cut him right through the bridge of the nose; then from the breadbox a handful of Hydrox cookies, one of his oldest passions; then “I’m going, Mom!” over the noise of the vacuum cleaner …

In his first months back he took long walks all over town, and almost always wound up by the high school. It was hard to believe that only two years before, he had been one of those kids whose heads he would see turned down over their books, suffering. But it was almost as hard to believe that he wasn’t
one of them too. One morning, just for the heck of it, he walked all the way up to the main door, right there by the flagpole, and listened to the voice of his old math teacher “Criss” Cross, that sweetheart, droning through the open window of 104. Never again in Roy’s entire life—
never—
would he have to walk up to the board and stand there with the chalk in his hand while old “Criss” gave him a problem to do in front of the entire class. To his surprise, the revelation made him very sad. And he had hated algebra. He had barely passed. When he had come home with a D his father had practically hit the ceiling … Boy, the things you can miss, he thought, if you’re a little crazy in the head, and strolled on, down through the ravine and out to the river, where he sat in the sun by the landing, separating Hydrox cookies, eating first the bare half, then the half to which the filling had adhered, and thinking, “Twenty. Twenty years old. Twenty-year-old Roy Bassart.” He watched the flow of the river and thought that the water was like time itself. Somebody ought to write a poem about that, he thought, and then he thought, “Why not me?”

Sometimes even before noon he was overtaken with hunger, and he would stop off downtown at Dale’s Dairy Bar for a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato, and a glass of milk. At the PX in Adak they wouldn’t make a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato sandwich. Don’t ask why, he once said to Uncle Julian. They just wouldn’t do it. They had the cheese and the bacon and the tomato and the bread, but they just wouldn’t put it all together on the grill, even if you told them how. You could talk yourself red in the face to the guy behind the counter, but he simply wouldn’t
do
it. Well, that’s the old chicken s—t Army, as he told Julian.