Read Online When She Was Good by Philip Roth - Free Book Online Page A

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’tone 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