When She Was Good Read online

  “No. He’s working. At least he is supposed to be. He goes there at night.”

  “Every single night?”

  “Almost.”

  “Are there women?”

  “No. Whiskey.”

  “Are you sure there are no women?”

  “Well, no,” Lucy said. “Oh, it’s awful. It’s horrible. I hate it!”

  It didn’t take very long for Kitty to tell Lucy about Saint Teresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower—Saint Teresa, who once said, “It is for us to console Our Lord, not for him to be consoling us …” Kitty had a little book with a blue cover called The Story of a Soul, in which Saint Teresa herself had written down all the wonderful things she had ever thought or said. Even though the weather had begun to turn and the days to grow dim by late afternoon, the two girls would sit on a bench in the little park across from St. Mary’s, huddled close together in their coats, while Kitty read to Lucy passages that she said would change her whole life, and get her into heaven for all eternity.

  In the beginning Lucy could not seem to get the hang of it. She listened attentively, sometimes with her eyes closed so as to concentrate better, but soon it began to seem that not being a Catholic, she was fated never to understand whatever it was that so inspired Kitty. She herself was Lutheran on one side and Presbyterian on the other, and the latter had been her church, back when her mother had been able to get her to go. A kind of melancholy about her spiritual stupidity slowly settled upon her, until one day, despising both herself and her narrow Protestant background, she looked over Kitty’s shoulder at a page of the mysterious book, and discovered that it wasn’t hard to understand at all. It was only that in reading aloud, Kitty—who suddenly seemed to her so hopelessly, so disgustingly, ignorant—substituted “a” for “the” and “he” for “she” and “what” for “when,” and left out entirely those words she couldn’t pronounce, or changed them into others.

  Still, Kitty loved Saint Teresa as Lucy had never loved anything, at least that she could remember; and so, gradually, when she began to get the drift of Saint Teresa’s meaning, and saw again and again how it flooded Kitty with joy to pronounce aloud those very words, nearly all of which Saint Teresa herself had written, she began to wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t forgive Kitty Egan her reading problem and try to love Saint Teresa too.

  It was Kitty who brought her to meet Father Damrosch. She began to take instruction from him for an hour after school two days a week, and to spend still other hours in the church, lighting endless candles to Saint Teresa, after whose life she and Kitty were going to model their own. At her first retreat she was given a black veil to keep by Sister Angelica of the Passion, a dark little woman with shiny skin and rimless spectacles and hair beneath her nose that so resembled a man’s mustache that Lucy said nothing of it for fear of offending Kitty, who adored Sister Angelica and didn’t even seem to notice the long black hairs. Kitty had told Sister Angelica about Lucy in a letter, and so the sister knew all about Lucy’s father, for whom she had already prayed at Kitty’s request. Sister Angelica was also praying for Babs in West Virginia. In vain, however, did they all wait for news from the vanished sinner. It was as though she had stepped directly from that restaurant in Aurora, Illinois, into Hell itself.

  Kitty and Lucy would read aloud to each other their favorite passages from Saint Teresa, who had left this fallen world at twenty-four, a gruesome death of weakness, cold, coughing and blood. “ ‘… to become a saint one must suffer the great deal,’ ” Kitty read, “ ‘always seek when is best, and forgot oneselfish …’ ”

  They both chose what Sister Angelica called “Saint Teresa’s little way of spiritual childhood.” Teresa’s only care, said Sister Angelica to Lucy, was that no person should ever be distressed or even inconvenienced by what she was enduring; “daily she sought opportunities for humiliating herself” (Sister Angelica read this to Lucy from a book, so it was not just something she was making up)—“for instance, by allowing herself to be unjustly rebuked. She forced herself to appear serene, and always courteous, and to let no word of complaint escape her, to exercise charity in secret, and to make self-denial the rule of her life.” The doctor who attended Teresa in her final illness had said, “Never have I seen anybody suffer so intensely with such an expression of supernatural joy.” And her last words, in the slow agony of her dying, were, “My God, I love Thee.”

  So Lucy dedicated herself to a life of submission, humility, silence and suffering; until the night her father pulled down the shade and up-ended the pan of water in which her mother was soaking her beautiful, frail feet. After calling upon Saint Teresa of Lisieux and Our Lord—and getting no reply—she called the police.

  Father Damrosch did not choose to call upon her himself when she (who usually attended at least two) failed to show up at a single Mass that Sunday, nor when she did not appear the following week for her instruction. Instead he apparently arranged for Kitty to be excused early from school one day so as to meet Lucy outside the high school, which recessed each afternoon thirty minutes before St. Mary’s. Kitty said that Father Damrosch knew about Lucy’s father spending the night in jail. Kitty said that this was only another reason for her to hurry and be converted. She was sure that if Lucy asked, Father Damrosch would see her an extra hour a week, and rush the conversion along so that she could be taking her first Communion within a month. “Jesus will forgive you, Lucy,” Kitty said, whereupon Lucy turned in anger and said that she did not see that she had anything for which to be forgiven. Kitty begged and begged, and finally when Lucy told her, “Stop following me! You don’t know anything!” Kitty began to weep and said she was going to write Sister Angelica so that she too would pray for Lucy to embrace the teachings of the Church before it was too late.

  She feared for a while that she would run into Father Damrosch downtown. He was a big burly man, with a mop of black hair, who liked to kick the soccer ball around with the Catholic boys after school. His voice and his looks made girls who were even Protestant swoon openly in the street. He and Lucy had had such serious discussions, during which she had tried so hard to believe the things he said. “This life is not our real life,” and she had tried with all her might to believe him … How had he found out so quickly what had happened? How did everybody know? At school, kids she hardly recogized had begun to say, “Hi,” as though it had been discovered she were dying of some dread disease and everybody had been told to be nice in the few weeks remaining to her. And after school a group of hideous boys who hung out smoking back of the billboard shouted after her, “Hey, Gang Busters!” and then imitated a machine gun firing. After they had kept at it for a whole week, she picked up a stone one afternoon, turned suddenly around, and threw it so hard that it left a dark mark where it struck against the billboard. But the boys only continued to jeer at her from where they had fled into a vacant lot.

  At home she continued to insist upon eating by herself in the kitchen, rather than with him, whom her grandfather had gone down and taken out of jail the very next morning. If the phone beside the table rang while she sat looking angrily at her food, she prayed that it would be Father Damrosch. What would her grandmother do when the priest announced himself? But he never did. She even thought of going directly to him—not to ask his help or his advice, but because she recognized one of the boys who called her “Gang Busters” from seeing him at nine o’clock Mass with his family every Sunday. However, she would let Father Damrosch know right off, she had nothing to be forgiven for and nothing to confess. Who was Kitty Egan even to suggest such a thing? A homely, backward girl from an illiterate family, whose clothes smelled like fried potatoes and who couldn’t read a sentence from a book without getting it all balled up! Who was she to tell Lucy anything? And as for Saint Teresa, that Little Flower, the truth was, Lucy couldn’t stand her suffering little guts.

  She gathered together her black veil, her rosary, her catechism, her copy of Story of a Soul and all the pamphlets she had accumulated at the
retreat and from the vestibule at St. Mary’s, and put them into a brown paper bag. What prevented her from simply dropping the items separately into the bottom of her wastebasket was the knowledge that her grandmother would see them there, and think that it was because of her objections to “all that Catholic hocus-pocus” that Lucy was giving up going into the Church. She did not wish her to have the satisfaction. What she decided to do about her religion, or about anything relating to her personal life, was the business of nobody in that house, least of all that snoop.

  She carried the paper bag with her to work that night, intending to drop it into a garbage can along the way, or toss it into a lot. But a rosary? a veil? a crucifix? Suppose the bag was found and brought to Father Damrosch? What would he think then? Perhaps the only reason he had refrained from calling her so far was because he felt it improper to interfere in a family already so strongly opposed to conversion; or perhaps he believed it improper to meddle in a private matter before his assistance had been asked for; or perhaps he had sensed all along that Lucy only half believed the things he told her and so would be immune to anything further he might have to say; or perhaps he had never really been that interested in her to begin with, thought of her as just another kid, and if she came to him, would only resume stuffing her full of catechism so as finally to stuff her into the confessional, where, like stupid Kitty Egan, she could ask forgiveness for sins that were not really her own and say prayers for people that did them absolutely no good. He would try to teach her to learn to love to suffer. But she hated suffering as much as she hated those who made her suffer, and she always would.

  After work she hurried out Broadway toward the river. At St. Mary’s she entered without genuflecting, placed the bag on the last bench, and ran. Outside, there was only one light on in the rectory … Was Father Damrosch standing behind one of the dark windows, looking down at her? She gave him a moment to call for her to come inside. And tell her what? This life is a prelude to the next? She didn’t believe it. There is no next life. This is what there is, Father Damrosch. This! Now! And they are not going to ruin it for me! I will not let them! I am their superior in every single way! People can call me all the names they want—I don’t care! I have nothing to confess, because I am right and they are wrong and I will not be destroyed!

  One night two weeks later Father Damrosch came into Dale’s Dairy Bar for a black and white ice cream soda. Dale popped immediately out from the back to say hello, and to serve the priest personally, saying all the while what a great honor it was. He refused to take Father Damrosch’s money, but the father insisted, and when he left, one of the waitresses said to Lucy, “He’s absolutely gorgeous.” But Lucy only continued carefully refilling the sugar bowls.

  The very next term Lucy took the music appreciation course, where she was prevailed upon by the teacher, Mr. Valerio, to become interested in the snare drum; so for the next year and a half the problem of what to do after school was solved by band. Either they were practicing in the auditorium, or on the field, or on Saturdays were off and away to a football game. There were always kids dashing in and out of bandroom, or shoving from behind onto the bus, or jamming together, epaulet to epaulet, in the band section, to stay warm while the game itself—which Lucy hated—wore interminably on. As a result, she was hardly ever alone around school to be pointed out as the kid who had done this or that terrible thing. Sometimes as she was rushing up out of the school basement with her drum, she would see Arthur Mufflin slinking around the basketball courts, or perched on his motorcycle, smoking. He had been thrown out of Winnisaw High years ago, and was some kind of hero to the boys who used to call her “Gang Busters” and “J. Edgar Hoover.” But if he himself had any smart remarks to make she didn’t wait to hear them. She would just start in practicing the marching cadence and continue all the way to the field, beating it out so loud that whether he called to her or not, she didn’t even know.

  But then, altogether unexpectedly, at the very start of her senior year, band was over. She had cut practice twice in two weeks to go up with Ellie Sowerby to The Grove; to Mr. Valerio she explained (her first lie in years) that her grandmother was ill and needed her—and he had swallowed it. So there was no tension between them at all; she was still his “dream girl.” Nor had the thrill gone out of marching up the field at the start of the afternoon, guiding her line, “Left … left … left, right, left,” and drumming out the muffled cadence till they reached the midfield stripe and launched into the National Anthem. It was the moment of the week she had come to live for, but not because of anything so ridiculous as school spirit—or even love of country, which she supposed she had, though no more than an ordinary person. It wasn’t the flag, snapping in the breeze, that gave her the gooseflesh so much as the sight of everybody in the stands rising as it moved down the field. She saw from the corner of her eye the arms sweep up, the hats swept off, and felt the drum thump-thumping softly against the guard on her leg, and the warmth of the sun fell on her hair where it poked out from under her black and silver hat with the yellow plume and oh, it was truly glorious—until that third Saturday in September, when they turned at the midfield stripe to face the stands (where everyone was silently standing facing them) and she tightened her hold on the smooth sticks, and Mr. Valerio climbed onto the folding chair that had been brought out to the field for him, and he looked down at them—“Band,” he whispered, smiling, “good afternoon”—and then in the moment before he raised his baton, she realized (for no good reason at all) that in the entire Liberty Center Consolidated High School Marching Band, there were only four girls: Eva Petersen, who played the clarinet and had a wall-eye; the harp-bell player, Marilynne Elliott, whose brother was a big hero, but who herself stammered; and the new French-horn player of whom Mr. Valerio was so proud, poor Leola Krapp, who had that name and was only fourteen and already weighed two hundred pounds—“stripped,” the boys said. And Lucy.

  On Monday she told Mr. Valerio that working in Dale’s Dairy Bar at night and having band practice in the afternoons wasn’t giving her time enough to study. “But we finish by four-thirty.” “Still,” she said, looking away. “But you managed last year, Lucy. And on the honor roll.” “I know. I’m really sorry, Mr. Valerio.” “Well, Lucy,” he said, “you and Bobby Witty are my mainstays. I don’t really know what to say. The big games are just coming up.” “I know, Mr. Valerio, but I think I have to. I think I better. College is coming up too, you know. And so I really have to knuckle down and make an all-out effort—for my scholarship. And I have to make the money at the Dairy Bar. If I could quit that, of course, then I could have this … but I just can’t.” “Well,” he said, lowering the lids of his big black eyes, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the rhythm in that drum section. I hate even to think about it.” “I think Bobby can carry them, Mr. Valerio,” she said, feebly. “Well,” he sighed, “I’m not Fritz Reiner. I suppose this is what they mean by a high school band.” “I’m really sorry, Mr. Valerio.” “It’s just I don’t often get a person, boy or girl, who is serious about the snare drum the way you are. Most of them, if you’ll pardon my language, just beat the damn thing to death. You listen. You’ve been my dream girl, Lucy.” “Thank you, Mr. Valerio. I really appreciate that. That means a lot to me. I sincerely mean that.” Then she laid on his desk the box in which she had folded up her uniform. The silver hat with the black peak and the gold plume she carried in her hand. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Valerio.” He took the hat and put it on his desk. “My drums,” she said, weakening by the moment, “are in bandroom.”

  Mr. Valerio sat there flicking the plume on her hat with one finger. Oh, he was such a nice man. He was a bachelor with a slight limp who had come to them all the way from a music school in Indianapolis, Indiana, and his whole life was band. He was so patient, and so dedicated; he was either smiling or sad, but never angry, never mean, and now she was letting him down, and for a selfish, stupid, unimportant reason. “Well, so long, Mr. Valerio. Oh, I�
��ll stop by and say hello, and see how things are going—don’t worry about that.”

  Suddenly he took a very deep breath and stood up. He seemed to have collected himself. He took one of her hands in his two and shook it, trying to look happy. “Well, it was good having you aboard, Dream Girl.”

  The tears rolled down her cheeks; she wanted to kiss him. Why was she doing this? Band was her second home. Her first home.

  “But,” Mr. Valerio was saying, “I suppose we are all going to survive.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “You take care now, Lucy.”

  “Oh, you take care, Mr. Valerio!”

  A little girl with braids was sitting in the swing on the porch when Lucy came running up the front stairs. “Hi!” the child said. Whoever was already at the piano stopped in the middle of a bar as she slammed the door and took the stairs, two at a time.

  As she turned the key in the bedroom door she heard the piano start up again downstairs. Instantly she pulled out her desk chair, stood up on it, and looked at her legs in the mirror over the dresser. They had hardly any shape; she was just too short and too skinny. But what could she do about that? She had been five one and a half now for two years, and as for weight, she didn’t like to eat, at least not at home. Besides, if she got any heavier her legs would just get round, like sausages—that’s what happened to short girls.

  She climbed down off the chair. She looked at herself straight on in the mirror. Her face was so square—and boring. The word “pug” had been invented to describe her nose. Eva Petersen had tried to give her that as a nickname in the band, but Lucy had told her to cut it out, which she did instantly, what with her own wall-eye. A pug nose wasn’t that bad, actually, except that where hers turned up at the end it was too thick. And so was her jaw, for a girl at any rate. Her hair was a kind of yellowish-white, and she knew that bangs didn’t help all that squareness any, but when she lifted them up (as she did now), her forehead was so bony. Well, at least her eyes were nice—or would have been had they belonged to someone else, though that was the trouble: they did belong to someone else. Sometimes she used to look at the mirror in the bandroom, and with her hat on she would be terrified by the resemblance she bore to her father—particularly those two round blue stains beneath the steep pale brow.