The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  “He’s dumb, Peter. I feel sorry for him. It takes a rat to love a rat.”

  I swallowed a taste of envy and said, “Daddy, this isn’t such a bad report.”

  “It couldn’t be worse,” he said, striding down the aisle with the windowpole. “It’s murder. And I deserve it. Fifteen years of teaching, and it’s all right there. Fifteen years of hell.” He took a rag from the book closet and went out the door. I read the report over again, trying to get some picture of Zimmerman’s actual mind. I couldn’t. My father came back, having soaked the rag at the drinking fountain in the hall. With long rhythmic swipes shaped like sideways 8’s he washed the blackboard. His earnest swishing underlined the silence; high on the wall the clock, controlled by the master clock in Zimmerman’s office, clicked, jumping from 4:17 to 4:18.

  “What does he mean,” I asked, “the humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences?”

  “You ask him,” my father said. “Maybe he knows. Maybe down deep in the atom there’s a little man sitting in a rocking chair reading the evening paper.”

  “Do you really think the school board will see this?”

  “Pray not, kid. It’s on file. I have three enemies on that board, one friend, and one I don’t know. Mrs. Herzog I don’t know if she’s heads or tails. They’d love to get me out of there. Get rid of the dead wood. A lot of veterans on this GI Bill and they’re all gonna need jobs.” He was grunting as he washed.

  “Maybe you should get out of teaching,” I said. My mother and I had often discussed this, but our discussions were cramped, for we kept bumping our heads against the fact that my father’s teaching was what sheltered us and let us live.

  “Too late, too late,” my father said. “Too late, too late.” He looked at the clock and said, “Jesus, I’m not kidding—I’m late. I told Doc Appleton I’d be there at 4:30.”

  My face baked with fear. My father never went to doctors. For the first time, I had proof that his illness was not an illusion; it was spreading outward into the world like a stain. “Really? You’re really going?” I was begging him to deny it.

  He knew my thoughts, and as we confronted each other through the vibrating shadows of the room a locker slammed, a child whistled, the clock clicked. “I called him this noon,” my father said, as if he were confessing a sin to me. “I just want to go and hear him tell how smart he was at med school.” He hung the wet rag over the back of his chair to dry and went to the windowsill and untwisted the pencil sharpener case and poured a rosy stream of shavings into the wastebasket. The scent of cedar filled the room like the perfume of an offering.

  I asked, “Can I go with you?”

  “Don’t do that, Peter. Go to the luncheonette and kill the time with your friends. I’ll pick you up in an hour and we’ll go into Alton.”

  “No, I’ll go with you. I don’t have any friends.”

  He took the sadly short coat from his closet. I followed him out. He closed the door of Room 204 behind us and we went down the stairs and through the first floor hall and past the glinting trophy case. This case depressed me; I first saw it as a tiny child and still had a superstitious sense of each silver urn containing the ashes of a departed spirit. Heller, the head janitor, was sprinkling crumbs of red wax over the floor and sweeping them toward us with a broad broom. “Another day, another dollar,” my father called to him.

  “Ach, ja,” the janitor called back. “Too soon oldt and too late schmardt.” Heller was a short dark Dutchman with solidly black hair though he was sixty. He wore rimless glasses that made him look more scholarly than most of the teachers in the building. His voice echoed after my father’s down the hollow length of the hall, which looked wet where light from a doorway or window lay on it. I was reassured, believing that nothing as absolute and awesome as death could enter a world where grown men could exchange such banalities. While my father waited, I ran to my locker in the annex hall and got my pea jacket and some books; I thought, wrongly, there might be a space in the coming hours when I could do some homework. As I returned to them I heard my father apologizing to Heller for, apparently, a few marks he had made on the floor. “No,” he said, “I hate to make the wonderful work you do any harder for you than it is. Don’t think I don’t appreciate what a job it is to keep this stockyard clean. It’s the Augean stable every day of the week.”

  “Ah well,” Heller said, and shrugged. As I came closer, his black shape stooped, so the handle of the broom seemed to pierce it. He straightened and presented in the palm of his open hand, for my father’s and my inspection, a few dry oblongs bigger than ordinary dirt and not readily identifiable. “Seeds,” he said.

  “What kid would be carrying seeds?” my father asked.

  “Maybe from an orange?” Heller suggested.

  “One goddam more mystery,” my father said, and he seemed to shy, and we went out into the weather.

  The afternoon was clear and cold and the sun above the westward section of town made our shadows long before us. We seemed from our shadow to be a prancing one-headed creature with four legs. A trolley car went down the pike, its connective wheel sizzling and sparking on the wire, westward into Alton. This was our ultimate direction; we were for the time being working against the tide. In striding silence, my steps three to his two, we passed the school’s side lawn. Some yards back from the pavement, there was a glass-fronted billboard. Miss Schrack’s senior art class made the posters for it; the present one displayed a great B painted in the school’s colors, maroon and gold, and announced:

  We crossed the little irregular asphalt alley that separated the school property from Hummel’s Garage. Here the pavement was stained with little maps of dropped oil, islands and archipelagos and continents undiscovered on this globe. We passed the pumps, and passed the neat white house beside whose little porch a trellis supported the crucified brown skeleton of a rose-vine; in June this rose-vine bloomed and gave every boy who passed this way ambrosial thoughts of fucking Vera Hummel. Two doors further on was Minor’s Luncheonette. It shared a brick building with the Olinger Post Office. There were two plate-glass windows side by side: behind one of them fat Mrs. Passify, the post-mistress, surrounded by Wanted posters and lists of postal regulations, doled out stamps and money-orders; behind the other, wreathed in adolescent smoke and laughter, Minor Kretz, also fat, scooped ice cream and concocted lemon Pepsis. The two establishments were symmetrically set up. Minor’s butterscotch-marble counter mirrored, through the dividing wall, Mrs. Passify’s barred windows and linoleum weighing-counter. As a child, I used to peek through the Local slot into the rear of the post office, seeing racks of sorted letters, stacked gray sacks, and one or two postmen in blue pants, hats and coats off, engaging in an official-seeming clatter. Likewise, to me as a child, the older teen-agers in the luncheonette seemed to slump in the back booths behind a screen of smoke whose slots permitted glimpses of a mysterious privacy as utterly forbidden to me as if by federal law. The pinball machine and the cancellation machine were twins of noise; where in the post office there was a small shelf bearing a dirty ruffle-edged blotter, a few splayed pens, and two dried bottles with gimcrack hinged mouths, in the luncheonette there was a small table offering for sale plastic cigarette cases, miniature gilt picture frames containing washed-out photographs of June Allyson and Yvonne de Carlo, playing cards with kittens and Scotties and cottages and lagoons on the back, and depraved 29¢ items like transparently loaded dice, celluloid pop eyes and buck teeth, dribble glasses, and painted plaster dog turds. Here you could buy, 2 for 5¢, sepia postcards of the Olinger Town Hall, the business strip of the Alton Pike decked out with overhead lights and plywood candles for Christmas, the view from Shale Hill, the new water-chlorinating plant way up above Cedar Top, and the town Honor Roll, looking as it did during the war—of wood and always being newly lettered—, before they put up the little stone one bearing only the names of those who had died. Here you could buy these cards, and next door, for a penny more, you could mail them; the sy
mmetry, carried right down to the worn spots of the two floors and the heating pipes running along the opposing walls, was so perfect that as a child I had imagined that Mrs. Passify and Minor Kretz were secretly married. At night, and on Sunday mornings, when their windows were dark, the mirroring membrane between them dissolved and, filling the unified brick shell with one fat shopworn sigh, they meshed.

  Here my father halted. In the brittle air his shoes scratched on the cement and his mouth moved like a puppet’s. “O. K., Peter,” he said. “You go into Minor’s and I’ll come back and pick you up when Doc Appleton’s done with me.”

  “What do you think he’ll tell you?” I was tempted. Penny might be in the luncheonette.

  “He’ll tell me I’m as healthy as a dumb old horse,” my father said, “and he’s as wise as a dirty old owl.”

  “You don’t want me to come with you?”

  “What can you do, you poor kid? Stay away and don’t depress yourself. Go see your friends, whoever the hell they think they are. I never had any friends, so I can’t imagine it.”

  My conscience and my father were rarely on opposite sides; I compromised. “I’ll go in here,” I said. “For a minute, then I’ll catch up.”

  “Take your time,” he said, with a sudden sweeping motion of his hand, as if remembering that unseen audience before which he was an actor. “You got lots of time to kill. At your age I had so much time to kill my hands are still bloody.” His talk was unreeling wider and wider; I felt chilled.

  Walking off alone, he seemed lightened and looked thinner. Perhaps all men look thinner from the back. I wished that for my sake he would buy a respectable coat. As I watched, he took the knit cap out of his pocket and put it on his head; pierced by embarrassment, I ran up the steps, bucked the door, and plunged into the luncheonette.

  It was a maze, Minor’s place. So many bodies: yet only a tiny section of the school ever came here. Others had other places; the set at Minor’s was the most criminal and it thrilled me to be, however marginally, a part of it. I felt in this clouded interior a powerful secret lurking, whose nostrils exhaled the smoke and whose hide exuded the warmth. The voices jostling in the stable-warmth all seemed to be gossiping about the same thing, some event that had happened in the minute before I arrived; I was haunted at that age by the suspicion that a wholly different world, gaudy and momentous, was enacting its myths just around the corners of my eyes. I pushed my way through the bodies as if through the leaves of a close-set series of gates. I picked my way past one, two, three booths and there, yes, there, she was. She.

  Why is it, love, that faces we love look upon each remeeting so fresh, as if our hearts have in this instant again minted them? How can I describe her to you justly? She was small and not unusual. Her lips were too plump and irksomely self-satisfied; her nose rather cursory and nervous. Her eyelids were vaguely Negroid, heavy, puffy, bluish, and incongruously worldly-wise when taken with the startled grassy innocence of her eyes. I believe it was these incongruities—between lips and nose, eyes and lids—these soft and silent clashes like the reticulating ripples hinting in the flow of a stream of irregular depths, that made her beauty for me; this delicate irresolution of feature held out the possibility of her being worthy of me. And made her seem always a bit unexpected.

  She was occupying one side of a booth and there was space beside her. Across the table, two ninth-graders she dimly knew, a girl and a boy, were tugging at each other’s buttons, blind to everything. She was gazing at them and did not see me until my body, easing in, pushed hers. “Peter!”

  I unbuttoned my pea jacket so the devil-may-care flame of my shirt showed. “Give me a cigarette.”

  “Where have you been all day?”

  “Here and there. I’ve seen you.”

  Nicely she tapped one of her Luckies from her purple-and-yellow plastic case, which had a little sliding door that opened and shut. She looked at me with flecked green irises whose perfect circles of black seemed dilated. I did not understand my ability to dissolve her composure and in my heart honestly took no credit for it. But her dissolution was welcome to me; it couched a kind of repose I had never known before. As a baby wishes to be put to bed, my hand wished to be between her thighs. I dragged and inhaled. “I had a dream about you last night.”

  She looked away, as if to give herself space in which to blush, “What did you dream?”

  “Not quite what you think,” I said. “I dreamed you turned into a tree, and I called ‘Penny, Penny, come back!’, but you didn’t, and I was leaning my face against the bark of a tree.”

  She took it a bit dryly, saying, “Why how sad.”

  “It was sad. Everything around me is sad these days.”

  “What else is sad?”

  “My father thinks he’s sick.”

  “What does he think he has?”

  “I don’t know. Cancer?”

  “Really?”

  My cigarette was stirring in me its mixture of nausea and giddiness; I wanted to put it out but instead, for her sake, inhaled. The booth partition across from us leaped a foot closer and the girl and the boy had fallen to bumping heads, like a pair of doped rams.

  “Sweetie,” Penny said to me. “Your father’s probably all right. He’s not very old.”

  “He’s fifty,” I said. “He just turned fifty last month. He always said he’d never live to be fifty.”

  She frowned in thought, my poor dumb little girl, and tried to find some words to comfort me, who was so infinitely ingenious at evading comfort. At last she told me, “Your father’s too funny to die.” A ninth-grader, she only had him as a teacher in study-hall; but the whole school of course knew my father.

  “Everybody dies,” I told her.

  “Yes, but not for a long time.”

  “Yes, but at some point that time has to become now.” And with this we carried the mystery to the far rim, and could only return.

  “Has he seen a doctor?” she asked, and, as impersonally as an act of weather, her thigh under the table had become tangent to mine.

  “That’s where he is now.” I shifted my cigarette to my right hand and casually dropped, as if to scratch an itch, my freed left hand onto my thigh. “I should be with him,” I told Penny, wondering if my profile looked as elegant as it felt, jut-lipped under a plume of smoke.

  “Why? What could you do?”

  “I don’t know. Be of some comfort. Just be there.” As naturally as water slips from higher to lower my fingers moved to her thigh from my own. Her skirt had a faunish weave.

  This touch, though she did not acknowledge it, interrupted the flow of her thought. She brought out jaggedly, “How can you? You’re just his child.”

  “I know,” I said, speaking quickly lest she think my touch was more than an accident, an incident of innocent elements. Having gained my place, I expanded it, fanning my fingers, flattening my palm against the yielding solid. “But I’m the only kid he has.” My using my father’s word “kid” brought him too close; his wrinkling squint, his forward-leaning anxiety seemed to loom in the unquiet air. “I’m the only person in the world he can talk to.”

  “That can’t be,” she said very softly, in a voice more intimate than the words. “Your father has hundreds of friends.”

  “No,” I said, “he has no friends; they don’t help him. He just told me.” And with something like the questing fear that made my father, in conversations with strangers, gouge deeper than courtesy found common, my hand, grown enormous, seized the snug wealth of her flesh so completely my fingers probed the crevice between her thighs and my little finger, perhaps, touched through the muffle of faun-feeling cloth the apex where they joined, the silken crotch, sacred.

  “Peter, no,” she said, still softly, and her cool fingertips took my wrist and replaced my hand on my own leg. I slapped my thigh and sighed, well-satisfied. I had dared more than I had dreamed. So it surprised me as needless and in a shy way whorish when she added in a murmur, “All these people.” As
if chastity needed an outer explanation; as if, if we were alone, the earth would sweep up and imprison my forearms.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and pleaded, “I must go after him.” I asked her, “Do you pray?”

  “Pray?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you pray for him? My father.”

  “All right.”

  “Thank you. You’re good.” We both looked back amazed at what we had said. I wondered if I had been guilty of blasphemy, using God as a tool with which to score myself the deeper on this girl’s heart. But no, I decided, her promise to pray did genuinely lighten my burden. Rising, I asked her, “Are you coming to the basketball game tomorrow night?”

  “I could.”

  “Shall I save you a seat?”

  “If you like.”

  “Or you save me one.”

  “All right. Peter.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry so much. Not everything is your fault.”

  Now the couple opposite us, classmates of Penny’s, whose names were Bonnie Leonard and Richie Lorah, came out of their nudging trance. In a burst of derisive triumph Richie yelled at me, “The Pumpkin Eater!” Bonnie feeble-mindedly laughed, and the air of the place, where I had felt so secure, became dangerous with words aimed at my face. Senior boys sporting adult pockets of shadow under their eyes called to me, “Hey, Eater, how’s your old man? How’s Georgie Porgie puddin’ ’n’ pie?” Once a student had had my father, he did not forget it, and the memory seemed to seek shape in mockery. An emotion of fermented guilt and fondness would seek to purge itself upon me, the petty receptacle of a myth. I hated it and yet it did give me importance; being Caldwell’s son lifted me from the faceless mass of younger children and made me, on my father’s strength alone, exist in the eyes of these Titans. I had only to listen and seem to smile as sweetly cruel memories tumbled from them:

  “He used to lie down in the aisle and holler, ‘Come on, walk all over me, you will anyway’ …”