When She Was Good by Philip Roth Page B

all-American end from the University of Wisconsin. When the new consolidated high school had been built in Liberty Center in 1930, people still had a picture in their minds of Don Brunn making those sensational end-zone catches over his shoulder during his four years in the Big Ten. What catching a football over your shoulder had to do with organizing a curriculum or estimating a budget was something that would remain incomprehensible to Alice Bassart until the day she died, but nevertheless, on the basis of that skill, Don, who had been teaching civics and coaching athletics down in a high school in Fort Kean, was offered the position in his old hometown. Being no fool, at least where his own interests were involved, he accepted. And so for eighteen years—eighteen solid years of midstream, as Alice expressed it whenever her anger caused her to become slightly incoherent—Don had been the principal (at least he sat in the principal’s office) and Lloyd had been what Alice Bassart called “the unofficial unsung hero.” Don wouldn’t so much as hire a new janitor without letting Lloyd take a look at him first, and yet Don got the salary of a principal, and was some kind of household godto parents in the community, while Lloyd, as far as the general public was concerned, was nobody.
    When Alice got off on this subject, Lloyd often found it necessary to quote what he said were the words of a man far wiser than either of them, the poet Bobbie Burns:
    “My worthy friend, ne’er grudge an’ carp,
Tho’ Fortune use you hard an’ sharp.”
    He agreed that Don was a grinning nincompoop, but that was one of the facts of life he had learned to accept long ago. After this much time you certainly couldn’t go around all day hoping and praying that the fellow might see the light and resign; if he could see that much light there might not be any cause for him to resign. Nor could you wait for him to slip on a banana peel; for one thing, Don was a healthy ox, destined to outlive them all, and for another, such an idea was beneath Alice even to think, let alone to say aloud. Either you could make your way through life with the bitter taste of envy always in your mouth, or you could remember that there are people in this world far worse off than yourself, and be thankful that you are who you are, and have what you have, and so on.
    Could Roy help it if he felt more like spending his evenings at Uncle Julian’s than at home? Not that he considered Julian perfect by any means, but at least his uncle believed in having something of a good time in life, and all his ideas weren’t about two centuries old. “Wake up!” Roy wanted to shout into his father’s ear. “It’s 1948!” But that Julian knew what year it was you could see right off, even in something like his clothes. Whereas the big magazine in Roy’s house was
Hygeia
, Julian took
Esquire
every month, and followed their clothing tips from top to toe. He was maybe a little too loud with his color combinations, at least for Roy’s taste, but you had to admit he was right in the current style, whatever it happened to be. Even his opinion of Mr. Harry S Truman (“half asshole and half Red”) didn’t keep him from having a collection of Harry Truman sport shirts that could knock your eye out … Atany rate, to appear in a public place without a tie wasn’t something Julian considered a scandal, nor did he act as though life on this planet was coming to an end if Roy showed up at the house with his shirttail accidentally hanging out. That Roy wasn’t going to get all worked up over things that were only “externals” was something Uncle Julian seemed capable of understanding. “Well,” he’d say, opening the door to his nephew in the evenings, “look who’s here, Irene—Joe Slob.” But smiling; not like Roy’s father, whom all through the Army his son had remembered most vividly as he used to see him coming out of Mr. Brunn’s office—gray hair combed