And that was all. I suppose it was innocent enough, but it was stupid. Happenheimer knew what the score was with Lyman, because I had emphasized it to him myself, in private, the day we test-drove that two-door Bonneville, so you might have thought he would have leaked it to his salesmen. And maybe he had. Maybe Parks was just trying a little dance-floor free-lance in order to improve his commission. I don’t know.
I don’t suppose the details matter. It’s just that his back-slapping attempt at salesmanship didn’t leave the Goodnoughs much. They had been finished with driving, and now any thought of night life was out too. About all they had left for themselves was a trip every six months to Doc Schmidt and a weekly drive to the grocery store. But that didn’t last long either. About a year later, when old Doc Schmidt retired after more than forty years of service to the community, closed his practice and moved himself and his wife to Tucson, Lyman decided he was through with doctors; he wasn’t ever going to another one. That left only the grocery store. You understand what I’m saying?—the goddamn grocery store. Here he had traveled all over this country by himself for twenty years; afterwards with Edith he had seen more of this Rocky Mountain region in six years than I’ll see in a lifetime; and now, in no time, he was satisfied with a seven-mile excursion into town—after cabbage and macaroni and beans.
Well, it didn’t take long for even that to be too much for him. He shuffled a little closer to the edge. That’s right, he refused to step outside for any reason. He wouldn’t leave the house. He was too busy traveling in the parlor.
About four years after his last Pontiac was wrecked, Lyman began to retrace his transcontinental trip. He sent off to Los Angeles and Boise and Omaha and Mobile and Cleveland for brochures, for chamber of commerce pamphlets, for bus schedules and train routes. Without once leaving the house, he was seeing the country again. He was traveling. He had his own old man’s travel bureau established with boxes and maps and a desk in the parlor. He could tell you what train to take from Boston to Chicago, what connections you had to make, what there was to see in the Windy City once you got there, where to stay—do all of that even if he was never going to take that train, make those connections, or see the Sears building himself. He didn’t want to. It was out of the question. If you had offered to pay his way and to sink him in luxury on a chartered jet, he would not have gone. He had limited his world to a space twenty feet square at the west end of the house. There he sat every day beside a lamp, poring like a travel clerk over road maps and glossy city flyers. To protect his eyes, Edith finally bought him a green visor, which he wore loose on his bald head, propped on his old man’s, hair-filled ears. It still about makes me sick to think about it. Not just for him—for her too, I mean.
I BELIEVE Edith’s one compensation during those last awful years was Rena Pickett. Edith loved that little girl, still loves her, and so do we. Why hell, Rena fills us all up, ornery as she is, bullheaded and independent as she is.