When She Was Good (2 page)

He found a room; then he found a job—he took an examination and scored high enough to become postal clerk; then he found a wife, a strong-minded and respectable girl from a proper family; and then he had a child; and then one day—the fulfillment, he discovered, of a very deep desire—he bought a house of his own, with a front porch and a backyard: downstairs a parlor, a dining room, a kitchen and a bedroom; upstairs two bedrooms more and the bath. A back bathroom was built downstairs in 1915, six years after the birth of his daughter, and following his promotion to assistant postmaster of the town. In 1962 the sidewalk out front had to be replaced, a whacking expense for a man now on a government pension, but one that had to be, for the pavement had buckled in half a dozen places and become a hazard to passers-by. Indeed, to this very day, when his famous agility, or jumpiness, has all but disappeared; when several times in an afternoon he finds himself in a chair which he cannot remember having settled into, awakening from a sleep he cannot remember needing;
when at night to undo his laces produces a groan he does not even hear; when in his bed he tries for minutes on end to roll his fingers into a fist, and sometimes must go off to sleep having failed in the attempt; when at the end of each month he looks at the fresh new calendar page and understands that there on the pantry door is the month and the year in which he will most assuredly die, that one of those big black numerals over which his eye is slowly moving is the date upon which he is to disappear forever from the world—he nevertheless continues to attend as quickly as he is able to a weak porch rail, or the dripping of a spigot in the bathroom, or a tack come loose from the runner in the hall—and all this to maintain not only the comfort of those who live with him yet, but the dignity of all too, such as it is.

One afternoon in November of 1954, a week before Thanksgiving, and just at dusk, Willard Carroll drove out to Clark’s Hill, parked down by the fence, and on foot climbed the path until he reached the family plot. The wind was growing colder and stronger by the minute, so that by the time he had reached the top of the hill, the bare trees whose limbs had only been clicking together when he left the car were now giving off a deep groaning sound. The sky swirling overhead had a strange light to it, though below, it already appeared to be night. Of the town he was able to discern little more than the black line of the river, and the head lamps of the cars as they moved along Water Street toward the Winnisaw Bridge.

As though this of all places had been his destination, Willard sank down onto the cold block of bench that faced the two stones, raised the collar of his red hunting jacket, pulled on the flaps of his cap, and there, before the graves of his sister Ginny and his granddaughter Lucy, and the rectangles reserved for the rest of them, he waited. It began to snow.

Waiting for what? The stupidity of his behavior dawned quickly. The bus he had left the house to meet would be pulling up back of Van Harn’s store in a few minutes; from it
Whitey was going to disembark, suitcase in hand, whether his father-in-law sat here in a freezing cemetery or not. Everything was in readiness for the homecoming, which Willard had himself helped to bring about. So what now? Back out? Change his mind? Let Whitey find himself another sponsor—or sucker? That’s right, oh, that’s it exactly—let it get dark, let it get cold, and just sit it out in the falling snow … And the bus will pull in and the fellow will get off and head into the waiting room, all brimming over with how he has taken someone in once again—only to find that this time no sucker named Willard is waiting in the waiting room.

But at home Berta was preparing a dinner for four; on the way out the kitchen door to the garage, Willard had kissed her on the cheek—“It’s going to be all right, Mrs. Carroll,” but he might have been talking to himself for all the response he received. As a matter of fact, that’s who he
was
talking to. He had backed the car down the driveway and looked up to the second floor, where his daughter Myra was rushing around her room so as to be bathed and dressed when her father and her husband came through the door. But saddest of all, most confusing of all, a little light was on in Lucy’s room. Only the week before, Myra had pushed the bed from one end of the room to the other, and taken down the curtains that had hung there all those years, and then gone out and bought a new bedspread, so that at least it no longer looked like the room in which Lucy had slept, or tried to sleep, the last night she had ever spent in the house. Of course, on the subject of how and where Whitey was to spend his nights, what could Willard do but be silent? Secretly it was a relief that Whitey was to be “on trial” in this way—if only it could have been in a bed other than that one.

And over in Winnisaw, Willard’s old friend and lodge brother Bud Doremus was expecting Whitey to show up for work at his hardware supply house first thing Monday morning. The arrangements with Bud dated back to the summer, when Willard had agreed to accept his son-in-law once again
into his house, if only for a while. “Only for a while” was the guarantee he had made to Berta; because she was right, this just could not be a repetition of 1934, with someone in need coming for a short stay and managing somehow to stretch it out to sixteen years of living off the fat of another fellow’s land, which wasn’t so fat either. But of course, said Willard, that other fellow did happen to be the father of the man’s wife—And just what does that mean, Berta asked, that it is going to be sixteen years again this time too? Because you are certainly still father to his wife; that hasn’t changed any. Berta, I don’t imagine for one thing that I have got sixteen years left to me, first of all. Well, said she, neither do I, which might be just another reason not even to begin. You mean just let them go off on their own? Before I even know whether the man really is changed over or not? asked Willard. And what if he really has reformed, once and for all? Oh sure, said Berta. Well, sneering at the idea may be your answer, Berta, but it just does not happen to be mine. You mean it does not happen to be Myra’s, she said. I am open to opinion from all sides, he said, I will not deny that, why should I? Well then, maybe you ought to be open to mine, Berta said, before we start this tragedy one more time. Berta, he said, till January the first I am giving the man a place to get his bearings in. January the first, she said, but which year? The year two thousand?

Seated alone up in the cemetery, the tree limbs rising in the wind, and the dark of the town seemingly being drawn up into the sky as the first snow descended, Willard was remembering the days of the Depression, and those nights too, when sometimes he awoke in the pitch-black and did not know whether to tremble or be glad that someone in need of him was asleep in every bed of the house. It had been only six months after going off to Beckstown to rescue Ginny from her life among the feeble-minded that he had opened the door to Myra and Whitey and their little three-year-old daughter, Lucy. Oh, he can still remember the tiny, spirited, golden-haired child that
Lucy had been—how lively and bright and sweet. He can remember when she was first learning to care for herself, how she used to try to pass what she knew on to her Aunt Ginny, but how Ginny, the poor creature, was barely able to learn to perform the simplest body functions, let alone mastering the niceties of tea parties, or the mystery of rolling two little white socks together to make a ball.

Oh, yes, he can remember it all. Ginny, a fully grown, fully developed woman, looking down with that pale dopey face for Lucy to tell her what to do next—and little Lucy, who was then no bigger than a bird. Behind the happy child, Ginny would go running across the lawn, the toes of her high shoes pointing out, and taking quick little steps to keep up—a strangely beautiful scene, but a melancholy one, too, for it was proof not only of their love for each other, but of the fact that in Ginny’s brain so many things were melted together that in real life are separate and distinct. She seemed always to think that Lucy was somehow herself—that is, more Ginny, or the rest of Ginny, or the Ginny people called Lucy. When Lucy ate an ice cream, Ginny’s eyes would get all happy and content, as though she were eating it herself. Or if as a punishment Lucy was put to bed early, Ginny, too, would sob and go off to sleep like one doomed … a different kind of scene, which would leave the rest of the family subdued and unhappy.

When it was time for Lucy to start school, Ginny started too, only she wasn’t supposed to. She would follow Lucy all the way there, and then stand outside the first floor where the kindergarten was and call for the child. At first the teacher changed Lucy’s desk in the hope that if Ginny didn’t see her she would grow tired, or bored, and go home. But Ginny’s voice only grew louder, and as a result Willard had to give her a special talking-to, saying that if she didn’t let Lucy alone he was going to have to lock a bad girl whose name was Virginia in her room for the whole day. But the punishment proved toothless, both in the threat and the execution: the moment they let her out of her room to go to the toilet, she
was running in her funny ducklike way down the stairs and off to the school. And he couldn’t keep her locked up anyway. It wasn’t to tie her to a tree in the backyard that he had brought his sister home to live in his house. She was his closest living relative, he told Berta, when she suggested some long kind of leash as a possible solution; she was his baby sister to whom something terrible had happened when she was only a one-year-old child. But Lucy, he was reminded—as if he had to be—was Myra’s daughter and his grandchild, and how could she ever learn anything in school if Ginny was going to stand outside the classroom all day long, singing out in her flat foghorn of a voice, “
Loo–
cy … 
Loo–
cy …”?

Finally the day came which made no sense whatsoever. Because Ginny wouldn’t stop standing outside a grade-school classroom calling out a harmless name, Willard was driving her back to the state home in Beckstown. The night before, the principal had telephoned the house again, and for all his politeness, indicated that things had gone about as far as they could. It was Willard’s contention that it was probably only a matter of a few weeks more before Ginny got the idea, but the principal made it clear to Mr. Carroll, as he had a moment earlier to the little girl’s parents, that either Ginny had to be restrained once and for all, or Lucy would have to be kept away from the school, which of course would be in violation of state law.

On the long drive to Beckstown, Willard tried over and over again to somehow make Ginny understand the situation, but no matter how he explained, no matter how many examples he used—look, there’s a cow, Ginny, and there’s another cow; and there’s a tree, and there’s another tree—he could not get her to see that Ginny was one person and Lucy was someone else. Around dinnertime they arrived. Taking her by the hand, he led her up the overgrown path to the long one-story wooden building where she was to spend the rest of her days. And why? Because she could not understand the most basic fact of human life, the fact that I am me and you are you.

In the office the director welcomed Ginny back to the Beckstown Vocational School. An attendant piled a towel, a washrag and a blanket into her outstretched arms and steered her to the women’s wing. Following the attendant’s instructions, she unrolled the mattress and began to make the bed. “But this is what my father did!” thought Willard. “Sent her away!” … even as the director was saying to him, “That’s the way it is, Mr. Carroll. People thinking they can take ’em home, and then coming to bring ’em back. Don’t feel bad, sir, it’s just what happens.”

Among her own kind Ginny lived without incident for three years more; then an epidemic of influenza swept through the home one winter, and before her brother could even be notified of her illness, she was dead.

When Willard drove up to Iron City to tell his father the news, the old man listened, and received what he heard without so much as a sigh; not a single human thing to say; not a tear for this creature of his own flesh and blood, who had lived and died beyond the reaches of human society. To die alone, said Willard, without family, without friends, without a home … The old man only nodded, as though his heartsick son were reporting an everyday occurrence.

Within the year the old man himself fell over dead with a brain hemorrhage. At the small funeral he arranged for his father up in Iron City, Willard found himself at the graveside suddenly and inexplicably stricken with that sense of things that can descend upon the tender-hearted, even at the death of an enemy—that surely the spirit had been deeper, and the life more tragic, than he had ever imagined.

He brushed the snow off the shoulder of his jacket and stamped away a tingling that was beginning in his right foot. He looked at his watch. “Well, maybe the bus will be late. And if it’s not, he can wait. It won’t kill him.”

He was remembering again: of all things, the Independence Day Fair held in Iron City—that Fourth of July almost sixty
years back when he had won eight of the twelve track events and so set a record that stands till today. Willard knows this because he always manages to get hold of an Iron City paper every fifth of July just so as to take a look and see. He can still remember running home through the woods when that glorious day was over, rushing up the dirt road and into the cabin, dropping onto the table all the medals he had been awarded; he remembers how his father hefted each one in his hand, then led him back outside to where some of the neighbors were gathered, and told Willard’s mother to give them an “on your mark.” In the race that followed, some two hundred yards, the father outdistanced the son by a good twenty feet. “But I’ve been running all day,” thought Willard. “I ran the whole way home—”

“Well, who’s the fastest?” one of the bystanders teased the boy as he started back to the cabin.

Inside, his father said, “Next time don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” said the child …

Well, there was the story. And the moral? What exactly were his memories trying to tell him?