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

at seventy years of age, to wheel yourself off into another room …
    Or he could pretend not to hear everything; let on that he was getting a little deaf. Who’d know the difference? Yes, that might well be a way of solving the whole thing, without bringing a wheelchair into the bargain. Just look blank, shrug your shoulders and walk away. In the months to come hecould pretend every once in a while to be slipping some with his faculties. Yes sir, just have to make their way without him. Welcome to use his house for a while, that was fine with him, but beyond that—well, he just wasn’t all there in the head, you know. Maybe to make his point so that it stuck, he ought to, on purpose to be sure, and knowing exactly what he was doing all the while, and not in Berta’s direction of course, do as his sad old friend John Erwin had begun unfortunately to do, and wet the bed.
    “But why? Why should I be senile? Why be off my head when that is not the case!” He jumped to his feet. “Why be getting pneumonia and worrying myself sick—when all I did was good!” The fear of death, horrible, hateful death, caused him to bring his lids tight down over his eyes. “Good!” he cried. “Unto others!” And down the hill he went, shedding snow from his jacket and his cap, while his old, aching legs carried him as fast as they could out of the graveyard.
    Not until he was past the cemetery road and under the street lamps of South Water Street did Willard’s heartbeat begin to resume something resembling a natural rhythm. Just because winter was beginning again did not mean that he was never going to see the spring. He was not only going to live till then, he was alive
right now
. And so was everybody shopping and driving in cars; problems or not, they are alive! Alive! We are all alive! Oh, what had he been doing in a cemetery? At this hour, in this weather! Come on, enough gloomy, morbid, unnecessary, last-minute thinking. There was plenty more to think about, and not all of it bad either. Just think how Whitey will laugh when he hears how in the middle of the night, as though in judgment of itself, the building that used to house Earl’s Dugout caved right in, roof first, and had to be demolished. And so what if Stanley’s is under new management? Whitey had as much disdain of a low-down saloon as anybody when he was being himself—and that was a good deal more often than it might appear, too, when you were purposely setting out to remember the low points in hislife. You could do that with anybody, think only about their low points … And wait till he sees the new shopping center, wait till he takes his first walk down Broadway—sure, they could do that together, and Willard could point out to him how the Elks had been remodeled—
    “Oh hell, the fellow is nearly fifty—what else can I even
do?
” He was speaking aloud now, as he drove on into town. “There is a job waiting for him over in Winnisaw. That has all been arranged, and with his say-so, with his wanting it, with his
asking
for it. As for the moving in, that is absolutely temporary. Believe me, I am too old for that other stuff. What we are planning is January the first … Oh, look,” he cried to the dead, “I am not God in heaven! I did not make the world! I cannot predict the future! Damn it anyway, he is her husband—that she loves, whether we like it or not!”
    Instead of parking at the back of Van Harn’s, he pulled up in front so as to take the long way to the waiting room, so as to have just another thirty seconds of reflection. He entered the store, slamming his wet cap against his knee. “And most likely,” he thought, “most likely won’t be there anyway.” Without coming into the waiting room, he set himself to peer inside. “Most likely I have sat up there for no good reason at all. In the end he probably did not even have it in him to come back.”
    And there was Whitey, sitting on a bench, looking down at his shoes. His hair was