When She Was Good (27 page)

No.

Just before Labor Day, Lucy said that since there did not seem to be any jobs for a photographer available, perhaps he should start to look for some other kind of work, but Roy said he was not going to get stuck in a job he hated, because the job he liked and was equipped to do hadn’t yet come along.

But their savings
were
rapidly dwindling, and this money, she reminded him, consisted not only of what he had saved in the Army, but what she had saved during all those years at the Dairy Bar.

Well, he happened to know that. That’s what he had been telling her all summer long. That was exactly what could have been avoided—and then he slammed the door and left the house before she could deliver the speech he saw coming, or before Mrs. Blodgett, who had already hammered on the floor above them with her shoe, could make it down the stairs to deliver hers.

Only an hour later there was a phone call for Roy from Mr. H. Harold LaVoy of the Britannia Institute. He said he understood that Mr. Bassart was looking for a job. He wished to inform him that Wendell Hopkins was in need of an assistant, his previous assistant having just enrolled as a full-time student in Britannia’s television department, which would be getting under way in the fall.

When Roy came home at lunchtime he was flabbergasted at the message. From
LaVoy?
Hopkins, the society photographer? He was shaved and dressed and out of the house in a matter of minutes; within the hour he had called Lucy to say that he wanted her to put Edward on.

Put Edward on? Edward was sleeping. What was he even saying?

Well then, she had better tell the baby herself: his father was now the assistant to Wendell Hopkins in his studio in the Platt Building in downtown Fort Kean. Well, was it or was it not worth waiting for?

What he couldn’t get over that night at dinner was that LaVoy had thought to call
him
—even after those disagreements they used to have almost daily in class, during the month that Roy had even bothered to show up. Apparently, however, LaVoy wasn’t really as touchy as he had appeared to be in the classroom. True, the old fruitcake couldn’t take criticism in public, but privately it appeared that he had developed a certain grudging respect for Roy’s knowledge of composition, and light and shadow. Well, you had to give him credit, he was a bigger man than Roy had thought. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t even a fruit; maybe that just happened, unfortunately for him, to be the way he walked and the way he
talked. Who knows, if they had ever gotten beyond the arguing stage, LaVoy might even have turned out to be a pretty sharp guy. They might even have become friends. Anyway, what difference did it make now? At the age of twenty-two he was the sole assistant to Wendell Hopkins, who, it turned out, only a few years back had done a portrait of the whole Donald Brunn family of Liberty Center. Oh, what a pleasure it would be to telephone his father directly after dinner and tell him about his new job—not to mention the fact that Mr. Hopkins was the family photographer for his father’s well-known boss.

Before the month was over they had found their first apartment; it was on the top floor of an old house at the north end of Pendleton Park, practically on the outskirts of Fort Kean. The rent was reasonable, the furniture wasn’t bad, and the big trees and quiet street reminded Roy of Liberty Center. There was a bedroom for the baby, and a large living room in which they could also sleep, and a kitchen and bath of their very own. There was also a dank and musty cellar back of the furnace that the renting agent said Roy was welcome to turn into a darkroom, so long as he realized that he would have to leave behind him any improvements he made in the building. The apartment was a twenty-minute drive to downtown, but the prospect of the darkroom clinched the deal.

The thirtieth of September was a Saturday, brisk and cloudy. They spent the morning driving their belongings over to their new home. Late in the day, when the moving was over and they had washed the last of the plates used for their last meal, Roy sat tapping lightly and sporadically on the horn of the car, while Lucy stood up on the porch, the baby in her arms, and told Mrs. Blodgett what she thought of her.

In the next year Roy drove in his car all over Kean County, photographing church socials, Rotary dinners, ladies’-club meetings, Little League games—and, most frequently, grade and high school graduation classes; the biggest share of Hopkins’ business, it turned out, was not out of the Fort Kean
social register, but from the Board of Education, of which his brother was a member. Hopkins himself stayed in the studio all day to do the serious sittings—the brides, the babies and the businessmen. His first week Roy had carried around a small spiral notebook in which he had planned to jot down the tips and advice that might pass from the lips of the seasoned old professional during a day’s work. Shortly he came to use it to record the cost of the gas pumped each day into the car.

Edward. A pale little baby with blue eyes and white hair, who for so very long had the sweetest, mildest, most serene disposition. He smiled benevolently up at everyone who looked admiringly down into his carriage when Lucy wheeled him through the park; he slept and ate when he was supposed to, and in between times just smiled away. The elderly couple who lived in the apartment below said they had never known a baby to be so quiet and well behaved; they had been prepared for the worst when they heard that a child was going to be living over their heads, but they had to tell young Mr. and Mrs. Bassart that they had no complaint so far.

Just before Edward’s first birthday, Uncle Julian hired Roy to come up to the house to take the pictures at Ellie’s pinning party. The next day Roy began to talk about leaving his job and opening a studio of his own. How much longer could he go on doing the D.A.R. in the afternoon and the high school prom at night? How much longer could he go on getting peanuts for doing the dreary dirty work, the weekend work, the night work, while Hopkins raked in the money and did all the creative jobs besides (if you could call anything Hopkins did “creative”)? Exactly how long was he supposed to let Hopkins get away with paying only for the gas, while Roy himself absorbed the depreciation on the automobile?

“LaVoy!” said Roy one night, after a gruesome afternoon photographing the boys and girls of the
4
H Club. “I really ought to go down to the Britannia and punch that pansy one right in the mouth. Because, you know something,
he
knew what this job was all along. A glorified errand boy. The photographic technique involved—well, Eddie could do it, for
God’s sake. And I’m telling you something, LaVoy knew it. Well, just think about it. Remember how surprised I was? Well, it was actually a piece of vengeance against me—can you imagine?—and I’m so dumb it never dawned on me till today, right in the midst of shooting all those kids going ‘cheese, cheese.’ Well, I’ll show him, and I’ll show Hopkins too. If I started my own place, I’d have half of Hopkins’ portrait trade within a year. And that’s a fact. That I know for a
fact
. All he needs is a little competition, then he’d be crying Mamma, all right.”

“But where would you run this studio, Roy?”

“Where would I run it? To begin with? Where would I
have
it? Is that what you mean?”

“Where will you run it? How much will it cost? What will you do to support us until the customers begin to leave Hopkins and come running to you?”

“Oh, damn,” he said, banging a fist on the table, “
damn
that LaVoy. He really couldn’t take criticism, not the slightest bit of it. And the thing is, I knew it all the time. But that he’d stoop to this—”

“Roy, where do you intend to start a studio?”

“Well—if you want to talk seriously about it …”

“
Where
, Roy?”

“Well—to start off, there’d have to be another rent, see.”

“
Another
rent?”

“But that’s what we can rule out. Because we have to, I know. We couldn’t afford it. So, to start off, well … I thought, here.”

“
Here?
”

“Well, the darkroom I’d have in the basement, of course.”

“And your studio itself would be in our living room?”

“Just during the day, of course.”

“And Edward and myself during the day?”

“Well, as I say, Lucy, it’s open to question, needless to say. I’m certainly willing to talk over the pros and cons, and peacefully too—”

“And the customers?”

“I
told
you, that would take time.”

“And what darkroom are you even talking about? You haven’t even begun a darkroom. You’ve talked about beginning a darkroom; oh, you’ve talked about it, all right—”

“Well, I work all day long, it so happens, you know. I come home at night bushed, frankly. And half the time on weekends he’s got me going out to some wedding somewhere out in the sticks—oh, forget it. You can’t understand anything about my career. Or my ambitions! I have a kid growing up, Lucy. And I happen to have ambitions that I haven’t given up, you know, just because I’m married. I’m sure not going to be the victim of that LaVoy’s vengeance for the rest of my life, I’ll tell you that. He tricked me right into this job, which is really for a grind, you know—and Hopkins pays me peanuts, compared to what photographers
can
make, and because I say I want a studio of my own to you, to my own
wife
—oh, you won’t understand anything! You won’t even try!” And he ran out the door.

It was nearly midnight when he returned.

“Where have you been, Roy? I have been sitting here waiting up for you, not knowing where you were. Where have you been? To some bar?”

“Some what?” he said sourly. “I went to a movie, Lucy, if you have to know. I went into town and saw a movie.”

He went off to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

When the lights were off he said, “Well, I tell you one thing. I don’t know about all the suckers before me, but as far as I’m concerned, Old Tightwad is at least going to split the car insurance starting when it gets renewed. I’m not working my you-know-what off to make him the richest guy in town.”

The months passed. No further mention was made of the studio, though from time to time Roy would mutter about LaVoy. “I wonder if the administration of that so-called school knows about that guy. A real honest to God homemade fruitcake, just like you hear about. Old la-dee-da LaVoy. H. Harold. Boy, would I love to run into him downtown some day, would I love to confront him some day face to face.”

One Sunday in the spring when they were visiting Liberty Center, Lucy overheard Roy’s mother saying that a package had arrived for him and was up in his bedroom on the dresser. Driving home that night she asked him what was in the package.

“What package?” said Roy.

The next day, after cleaning up from breakfast and making Edward’s bed, she began to search the apartment. Not until after lunch, when Edward was napping, did she find a small box jammed down into the top of one of Roy’s old Army boots, way at the back of the hall closet. The box was from a printing firm in Cleveland, Ohio; inside were hundreds and hundreds of business cards reading

When Roy came home in the evenings, he usually played this game with his little boy (bushed as he might be). “Ed?” Roy would say as he came through the door. “Hey, has anybody here seen Edward Bassart?” whereupon Edward would pop up from behind the sofa, and aiming himself for the front door, go running full tilt into his father’s arms. Roy would sweep him up off the floor and twirl him around overhead, crying out in mock amazement, “Well, I’ll be darned. I will be absolutely be darned. It’s the original Edward Q. Bassart himself.”

The evening of the day Lucy had discovered his secret, Roy came through the door, Edward ran wildly to him, Roy swung him up over his head, and Lucy thought, “No! No!”—for suppose the tiny, innocent, laughing child were to take his father for a man, and grow up in his image?

She controlled herself throughout the dinner and while Edward was read to by Roy, but after he had put his son to bed she was waiting for him in the living room with the package from Cleveland, Ohio, sitting on the coffee table. “When are you going to grow up? When are you going to do
the job you have without looking for every single way there is to get out of it?
When?
”

His eyes filled with tears and he rushed out of the apartment.

Again it was midnight before he returned. He’d had a hamburger, and gone to another movie. He took off his coat and hung it in the closet. He went into Edward’s room; when he came out—still refusing to engage her eye—he said, “Did he wake up?”

“When?”

He picked up a magazine and spoke while flipping through it. “While I was gone.”

“Fortunately, no.”

“Look,” he said.

“Look what?”

“Oh,” he said, plunging into a chair, “I’m sorry. Well, I am,” he said, throwing up his arms. “Well, look, am I forgiven or what?”

He explained that he had seen the ad for the business cards in the back of a trade magazine down at Hopkins. A thousand cards—

“Why not ten thousand, Roy? Why not a hundred thousand?”

“Let me finish,
will you?
” he cried.

A thousand cards was the smallest amount you could order. That was the bargain, a thousand for five ninety-eight. Okay, he was sorry he had done it without talking first to her; that way they could have argued out the sense of ordering the cards before some of the other things were planned. He knew that as far as she was concerned it wasn’t the money but the principle of the thing.

“It’s both, Roy.”

Well, maybe both, according to her, but really and truly he didn’t know how much longer he could stand the way Hopkins was exploiting him for sixty-five lousy dollars a week. At this point the resale value on the Hudson was practically nil. If she was so concerned about five ninety-eight for business
cards, what about that, the depreciation on the car? And what about a little thing called his career? Last week, two whole evenings photographing practically every single Brownie and Cub Scout in the country! By now he would have been a graduate of Britannia, if he hadn’t had to go out and get a stupid job like this one so as to support a family.