When She Was Good (30 page)

In the summer after Edward’s third birthday Blanshard Muller began to become a regular caller at the house. Mullers had lived over on Hardy Terrace, back of the Bassarts’, in fact, for as long as Willard could remember. Blanshard lived alone there now, for his wife had died a tragic death three years back—Parkinson’s disease—and his children were all grown and away. The older son, Blanshard, Jr., was married and had a family of his own in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was already a junior executive in the purchasing department of the Rock Island Railroad; and Connie Muller, whom Lucy remembered as a big, beefy boy two years behind her in school, was finishing up in veterinary medicine at Michigan State.

Thirty years back Blanshard Muller had started out in business with a kit of tools and his two strong legs—Daddy Will’s description—and had gone around to offices all over the county, repairing typewriters. Today he rented, sold and serviced just about every kind of office machine in existence, and was sole owner of the Alpha Business Machine Company, located right back of the courthouse in Winnisaw. In his early fifties, he was a tall man with iron-gray hair that he combed
very flat, a ski nose and a manly jaw. When he removed his square rimless spectacles, which he did whenever he sat down to eat, he bore a strong resemblance to none other than Bob Hope. Which was a little ironical, Daddy Will said, because Mr. Muller himself did not have much of a sense of humor. But there was no doubt that he was a respectable, dependable and hard-working person; you only had to look at the record to know that. Berta had taken to him immediately, and even Willard was heard to say, as the months went by, that there was certainly a lot to admire in a fellow who didn’t just ramble on or talk your ear off, but said what he had to say and left it at that. Certainly when he did express himself on a subject—such as the modernization of mail-sorting through automation, which Willard had brought into the conversation one Sunday after dinner—his thinking was clear and to the point.

Christmas Eve, with Whitey gone now more than three years, Blanshard Muller asked Myra to divorce her husband on the grounds of desertion, and become his wife.

Lucy learned of the proposal the next morning when Roy called his family, and then hers, to say that they would not be able to get up to Liberty Center for Christmas. That morning Edward had awakened with a high fever and a bad cough; that he was too sick to go up and celebrate the holiday with his adoring grandparents caused the child to cry and cry with disappointment—and this saddened her. But it was all that saddened her. She had every reason to suspect that on that day someone would have suggested that they all go on over to the Sowerbys’ after dinner, or that the Sowerbys come to the Bassarts’; and given the spirit of the holiday, what could she have said or done to prevent the reunion? Of course she knew that she could not keep Roy from his aunt and his uncle forever, but she also knew that once such a meeting took place, he would once again be open to the most pernicious kinds of advice, and she and Edward would again be in danger of being abused, or even abandoned. If only she could arm him against his uncle’s influence once and for all! But how?

When they finally got up to Liberty Center late in January
—Edward’s bronchitis had lingered nearly three weeks—they found that Lucy’s mother hadn’t yet given Mr. Muller a definite answer to his proposal. By the New Year, Berta had about lost patience with her daughter, but Daddy Will had made it clear to her that Myra was forty-three years old and in no way to be pushed or pressured into an important decision such as remarriage. She would make it official when she was ready to. Anybody who had eyes could see she was edging up on saying yes with every day that passed. Twice a week now she drove over to Winnisaw to have lunch with Blanshard at the inn; and even on weekday nights she either went off with him to a movie, or to a social evening among his own circle of friends. In the middle of the month she had even helped him pick out new linoleum for his kitchen floor. The kitchen and bathroom had begun to be modernized years ago, but the job had never been completed because of Mrs. Muller’s illness and death. Myra told her family that helping him choose his linoleum was a favor she would have done for anyone who asked; they were not to interpret it as any kind of decision on her part to become his wife.

However, the very next night, when Blanshard had to be at home interviewing a new salesman, she had paced and paced the living room, and after an hour of anguish, gone off into the kitchen and telephoned his house. It was really none of her business, she did not want him to think that she was in any way criticizing the woman who had been his wife, but she could not keep it inside her any more. She had to tell him how much she disapproved of the color scheme that had been chosen for the upstairs bathroom; if it was not too late to cancel the cabinets and fixtures he had gone ahead and ordered, she hoped very much that he would. She would understand, of course, if he didn’t wish to, for reasons of sentiment, but of course that wasn’t what he said.

So the cat appeared to be in the bag, so to speak. Except that if Berta kept on endlessly chronicling Blanshard’s accomplishments and virtues, she might find that single-handed she had gained just the opposite effect of what she had intended. Maybe
the best thing was to let Blanshard Muller argue his own case, and let Myra herself decide whether she wanted to start out on a new life with such a man. It was surely no solution to anything to hold a shotgun to someone’s head until the person said “I do”; you cannot force people to be what it simply is not within their power to be, or to feel feelings that they just do not have in their repertoire of tricks. “Ain’t that so, Lucy?” he asked, figuring probably that she would ally herself with him as against Berta, but she pretended not to have been following the discussion.

It was a most dismal afternoon. Not only because she had to listen to her grandfather spouting the weak-kneed philosophy that had brought them practically to the point of ruin—the philosophy that encouraged people to believe that they couldn’t be more than they were, no matter how inferior and inadequate that happened to be; it was dismal not only because what her grandfather seemed to want was to keep his daughter living in his house as long as he possibly could, and what her grandmother seemed to want was to shove her out into the street, man or no man, within the hour; it was dismal because she discovered that she herself did not really seem to care whether her mother married Blanshard Muller or not. And yet it was what she had prayed for all her life—that a man stern, serious, strong and prudent would be the husband of her mother, and the father to herself.

They drove to Fort Kean through a blizzard that evening. Roy was silent as he navigated slowly along the highway, and Edward fell asleep against her. Bundled in her coat, she watched the snow blowing across the hood and thought, yes, her mother was on the brink of marrying that good man her daughter had always dreamed of, and her own husband had stopped trying to evade his every duty and obligation. He had settled at last into the daily business, whether he liked it or not, of being a father and a husband and a man: her child had two parents to protect him, two parents each doing his job, and it was she alone who had made all this come about. This battle, too, she had fought and this battle, too, she had won, and yet it
seemed that she had never in her life been miserable in the way that she was miserable now. Yes, all that she had wanted had come to be, but the illusion she had, as they drove home through the storm, was that she was never going to die—she was going to live forever in this new world she had made, and never die, and never have the chance not just to be right, but to be happy.

It snowed and snowed that winter, but almost always after dark. The days were sharp with cold and brilliant with white light. Edward had a blue snowsuit with a hood, and little red mittens, and new red galoshes, and when she had finished straightening up the apartment, she would dress him in his bright winter clothes and take him with her as she pulled the shopping cart to the market. He would walk along beside her, planting each red galosh into the fresh snow and then pulling it out, always with great care and concentration. After lunch and his nap, they would go around to Pendleton Park with his sled. She would draw him around the paths and down a gentle little slope on the empty golf course. More and more they took the long way home, around by the pond where the schoolchildren were dashing about on skates, and out of the park by the women’s college.

Her classmates had graduated the previous June. Probably that explained why she could now walk casually around by the campus that she had purposely avoided all these years. As for her teachers, she doubted if any of them would even remember her; she had come and gone too fast. Oh, but it was strange, very strange, to be pulling Edward on his sled past The Bastille. She wanted to tell him about the months that she had lived there. She wanted to tell him that he had lived there too. “The two of us—in that building. And no one would help, no one at all.”

Since her student days, the barracks had been torn down and replaced by a long modernistic brick building that housed the classrooms, and now a new library was being built back of The Bastille. She wondered where the student health service
was located these days; she wondered if that same cowardly doctor was still employed by the college. She would not have minded if he were to cross her path some afternoon and recognize her with her child. She believed there might be some satisfaction for her in that.

Some afternoons she and Edward warmed themselves over a hot chocolate in the very same booth at the back of The Old Campus Coffee Shop where she had used to eat her lunch during the last months of her pregnancy. In the mirror beside the booth she saw the two of them, their noses red, their pale strawlike hair hanging into their eyes, and the eyes themselves, exactly the same. How far the two of them had come since those horrible days in The Bastille! Here, at her side, was the little boy she had refused to destroy—the little boy she now refused to see deprived! “Thank you, Mamma,” he said, as he solemnly watched her spoon the marshmallow from the top of her hot chocolate onto his, and she thought, “Here he is. I saved his life. I did it—all alone. Oh, why should I feel such misery? Why is my life like this?”

The icicles they had passed when they had come out into the sunshine earlier on had lengthened by dusk. Every day Edward broke off the longest icicle he could find and held it carefully in his mittens until, at home, he would put it into the refrigerator for his Daddy to see when he returned from work. He was truly an adorable child, and he was hers, indisputably hers, brought into the world by her and protected in it by her too: nevertheless she felt herself doomed forever to a cruel and miserable life.

For Valentine’s Day, Roy brought home two heart-shaped boxes of candy, a big one from him, a smaller one “from Edward.” After the little boy’s bath, Roy took a picture of him, with his hair combed, and in his bathrobe and slippers, presenting Lucy with her gift a second time.

“Smile, kiddies.”

“Take the picture, Roy, please.”

“But if you’re not even smiling—”

“Roy, I’m tired. Please take it.”

After Edward was in bed, Roy sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and some Hydrox cookies and one of his manila folders. He began to look through all the pictures he had taken of Edward since he was born. “You want to hear an idea I had today?” He came into the living room, wiping his mouth. “It’s just an idea, you know. I mean I’m not serious about it, really.”

“About what?”

“Well, sort of getting all the pictures of Eddie, putting them in chronological order according to his age, and giving it a name. You know, it’s probably just a silly idea, but I’ve got the pictures for it, I can tell you that much.”

“What is
it
, Roy?”

“Well, a book. Kind of a story in photographs. Don’t you think that could be a good idea, if somebody wanted to do it? Call it ‘The Growth of a Child.’ Or ‘The Miracle of a Child.’ I wrote out a whole list of possible titles.”

“Did you?”

“Well, during lunch. They sort of started coming at me … so I wrote them down. Want to hear?”

She got up and went into the bathroom. Into the mirror she said, “Twenty-two. I am only twenty-two.”

When she came back into the living room the radio was playing.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Aren’t you all right, Lucy?”

“I’m feeling
fine.
”

“Look, I didn’t mean I’m going to
publish
a book even if I could.”

“If you want to publish a book, Roy, publish a book!”

“Well, I won’t! I was just having some fun. Jee—
zuz.
” He picked up one of his family’s old copies of
Life
and began leafing through it. He slumped into his chair, threw back his head and said, “Wow.”

“What?”

“The radio. Hear that? ‘It Might As Well Be Spring.’ You know who that was my song with? Bev Collison. Boy. Skinny Bev. I wonder whatever happened to her.”

“How would I know?”

“Who said you’d know? I was only reminded of her by the song. Well, what’s wrong with that?” he asked. “Boy, this is really some Valentine’s Day night!”

A little later he pulled open the sofa, and they laid out the blanket and pillows. When the lights were off and they were in bed, he said that she had been looking tired, and probably she would feel better in the morning. He said he understood.

Understood what? Feel better why?

From the bed they could see the snow falling past the street lamp outside. Roy lay with his hands behind his head. After a while he asked if she was awake too. It was so calm and beautiful outside that he couldn’t even sleep. Was she all right? Yes. Was she feeling better? Yes. Was there anything the matter?
No
.

He got up and stood for a while looking outside. He carefully drew a big letter B in the frost on the window. Then he came and stood over the bed.