The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  “… about six of us filled our pockets up with horsechestnuts …”

  “… seven minutes to the hour everybody stood up and stared as if his fly was open …”

  “Christ, I’ll never forget …”

  “… this girl in the back of the class said she couldn’t see the decimal point … he went to the window and scooped some snow off the sill and made a ball … hard as hell at the fucking blackboard …”

  “ ‘Now can you see it?’ he said.”

  “Christ, what a character.”

  “You got a great father there, Peter.”

  These ordeals usually ended with some such unctuous benediction. It thrilled me, coming from these tall criminals, who smoked in the lavatories, drank hooch in Alton, and visited Philadelphia whorehouses staffed by Negro women. My obliging laugh stiffly dried on my face and, suddenly contemptuous, they turned their backs. I rethreaded my way to the front of the luncheonette. Someone in the booths was imitating a rooster. In the jukebox Doris Day was singing “Sentimental Journey.” From the rear a chorus of cheers rhythmically rose as the pinball machine, gonging in protest, gave up one free game after another. I looked back and through the crush saw that it was Johnny Dedman doing the playing; there was no mistaking those broad, faintly fat shoulders, the turned-up collar of the canary-yellow corduroy shirt, the baroque head of wavy hair crying for a haircut and scooped behind into a wet ducktail. Johnny Dedman was one of my idols. A senior flunked back into a junior, he performed exquisitely all the meaningless deeds of coördination, jitterbugging and playing pinball and tossing salted nuts into his mouth. By an accident of alphabetization he sat next to me in one study hall and taught me a few tricks, how to make a wooden popping noise by pulling my finger from my mouth, for instance—though I could never do it as loudly as he. He was inimitable and no doubt it was foolish to try. He had a rosy babyish face and a feathery mustache of pale unshaven hair and an absolute purity of ambitionlessness: even his misbehavior was carried forward without any urgency or stridence. He did have a criminal record: once in Alton, wild on beer at the age of sixteen, he had struck a policeman. But I felt he had not sought this out but rather fell into it coolly, as he seemed on the dance floor to fall into the steps that answered his partner and made her, hair flying, cheeks glowing, ass switching, swing. The pinball machine never tilted on him; he claimed he could feel the mercury swaying in the Tilt trigger. He played the machines as if he had invented them. Indeed, his one known connection with the world of hard facts was an acknowledged mechanical ability. Outside of Industrial Arts, he consistently got E’s. There was something sublime in the letter that took my breath away. In that year, the year I was fifteen, if I had not wanted so badly to be Vermeer, I would have tried to be Johnny Dedman. But of course I had the timid sense to see that you do not will to be Johnny Dedman; you fall into it at birth, ripe from the beginning.

  Outdoors I turned the points of my wide jacket collar against my throat and walked up the Alton Pike two blocks to Doc Appleton’s office. The trolley car released from waiting at the turnout by the trolley that was going westward into Alton as my father and I left the school swayed up the pike, full of gray workers and standing shoppers coming home, going eastward toward Ely, the tiny town at the end of the line. I had lost perhaps ten minutes. I hurried and, having told Penny to pray, prayed Let him live, let him live, do not let my father be sick. The prayer was addressed to all who would listen; in concentric circles it widened, first, into the town, and, beyond, into the hemisphere of sky, and, beyond that, into what was beyond. The sky behind the eastward houses already was purple; above, it was still deep daylight blue; and behind me the sky beyond the houses was aflame. The sky’s blue was an optical illusion that, though described to me in General Science class by my father himself, my mind could only picture as an accumulation of lightly tinted crystal spheres, as two almost invisibly pink pieces of cellophane will together make rose; add a third, you have red; a fourth, crinkling crimson; and a fifth, such a scarlet as must blaze in the heart of the most ardent furnace. If the blue dome beyond the town was an illusion, how much more, then, of an illusion might be what is beyond that. Please, I added to my prayer, like a reminded child.

  Doc Appleton’s house, which had his office and waiting-room in the front part, was a custard-colored stucco set deep on a raised lawn sustained by a sandstone wall a little less than my height. On either side of the steps up to the lawn there were two stone posts topped by large concrete balls, a device of exterior decoration common in Olinger but rare, I have since discovered, elsewhere. Abruptly, as I raced up the sloping walk toward the doctor’s door, all the lamps in the homes of the town began to burn—as in a painting the slight deepening of a shade will make the adjacent color glow. The broad line between day and night in this instant had been crossed.

  PLEASE RING AND WALK IN. Since I was not myself a patient, I did not ring. I imagined that somehow if I did, Doc Appleton’s accounts would be thrown off, like a checkbook with an uncashed check from it. In the vestibule of his house there was a cocoa mat and an immense stucco umbrella stand ornamented, higgledypiggledy, with chips of colored glass. Above the umbrella stand hung a small dark print, frightful to look at, of some classical scene of violence. The horror of the spectators was so conscientiously dramatized, the jumble of their flung arms and gaping mouths rendered with such an intensity of scratching, the effect of the whole so depressing and dead, that I could never bring myself to focus on what the central event was—my impression was vaguely of a flogging. In the corner of the print, before I snapped my head away as if from the initial impact of pornography, I glimpsed a thick line—a whip?—snaking about a tiny temple etched with spidery delicacy to indicate distance. That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read. I went into Doc Appleton’s waiting-room on my right. Here old oak furniture padded in cracked black leather lined the walls and encircled a central table laden with battered copies of Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post. A three-legged coat rack like a gaunt witch glowered in one corner and the shelf above its shoulder supported a stuffed crow gone gray with dust. The waiting-room was empty; the door of the consulting-room was ajar and I heard my father’s voice asking, “Could it be hydra venom?”

  “Just a minute, George. Who came in?”

  With the broad bald face of a yellowish owl Doc Appleton peered out of his office. “Peter,” he said, and like a ray of sunlight the old man’s kindness and competence pierced the morbid atmosphere of his house. Though Doc Appleton delivered me, I first remembered him from a time when I was in the third grade and, worried about my parents’ fights, bullied by older boys coming back from school, ridiculed at recess for my skin whose spots under the stress had spread to my face, I came down with a cold that did not go away. We were poor and therefore slow to call a doctor. On the third day of my fever they called him. I remember I was propped up on two pillows in my parents’ great double bed. The wallpaper and bedposts and picture books on my covers beside me all wore that benevolent passive flatness that comes with enough fever; no matter how I wiped and swallowed, my mouth stayed dry and my eyes stayed moist. Sharp footsteps disciplined the stairs and a fat man wearing a brown vest and carrying a fat brown bag entered with my mother. He glanced at me and turned to my mother and in an acid country voice asked, “What have you been doing to this child?”

  There were two strange facts about Doc Appleton: he was a twin, and like me he had psoriasis. His twin was Hester Appleton, who taught Latin and French at the high school. She was a shy thick-waisted spinster, smaller than her brother and gray-haired whereas he was bald. But their brief hook noses were identical and the resemblance was plain. The idea, when I was a child, of these two stately elderly people having popped together from the same mother had an inexhaustible improbability that
made them both seem still, in part, infants. Hester lived with the doctor in this house. He had married but his wife had died or disappeared years ago under dark circumstances. He had had a son, Skippy, years older than I but like me an only child; my father had had him in school and the boy had gone on to become a surgeon somewhere in the Midwest, in Chicago, St. Louis, or Omaha. Across the mysterious fate of Skippy’s mother there lay this further shadow: Doc Appleton belonged to no church, neither Reformed nor Lutheran, and believed, they said, in nothing. This third strange fact I had picked out of the air. The second, his psoriasis, my mother had revealed to me; until I was born only he and she in the town had been blighted by it. It had kept him, my mother said, from becoming a surgeon, for when the time came for him to roll up his sleeves, the pink scabs would be revealed and the patient on the table in fright might cry, “Physician, heal thyself!” It was a pity, my mother thought, for in her opinion Doc Appleton’s great talent lay in his hands, was manipulative rather than diagnostic. She often described how he had painted and cured a chronic sore throat of hers with one fierce expert swab of a long cotton-tipped stick. She seemed to have thought, at one time in her life, a lot about Doc Appleton.

  Now he stooped toward me in the dimness of his waiting-room, his pale round face straining to focus on my brow. He said, “Your skin looks fair.”

  “It’s not too bad yet,” I said. “It’s worst in March and April.”

  “Very little on your face,” he said. I had thought there was none. He seized my hands—I felt that fierce sureness of touch my mother had felt—and studied my fingernails in the light filtering from the brighter room. “Yes,” he said. “Stippled. Your chest?”

  “Pretty bad,” I said, frightened I would have to show him.

  He blinked massively and dropped my hands. He was wearing a vest but not a coat and his shirtsleeves above the elbow were clipped by black elastics like narrow bands of mourning. A gold watch-chain formed a shifting pendulous arc across the brown vest of his belly. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. He switched on a light, and an overhead chandelier of brown and orange glass held together by black leading plunged pools of shine onto the wash of magazines on the central table. “You read, Peter, while I finish with your Dad.”

  From the consulting-room my father’s voice earnestly called, “Let the kid come in, Doc. I want him to hear what you have to tell me. Whatever happens to me, happens to him.”

  I was shy of entering, for fear of finding my father undressed. But he was fully clothed and sitting on the edge of a small hard chair with stencilled Dutch designs. In this bright room his face looked blanched by shock. His skin looked loose; his little smile had spittle in the corners. “No matter what happens to you in life, kid,” he said to me, “I hope you never come up against the sigmoidoscope. Brrough!”

  “Tcha,” Doc Appleton grunted, and lowered his weight into his desk chair, a revolving and pivoting one that seemed to have been contoured for him. His short plump arms with their efficient white hands perched familiarly on the accustomed curve of the carved wooden arms, which culminated in an inner scroll. “Your trouble, George,” he said, “is you have never come to terms with your own body.” To be out of their way, I sat on a high white metal stool beside a table of surgical tools.

  “You’re right,” my father said. “I hate the damn ugly thing. I don’t know how the hell it got me through fifty years.”

  Doc Appleton removed the stethoscope from around his neck and laid it on his desk, where it writhed and then subsided like a slain rubber serpent. His desk was a wide old rolltop full of bills, pill envelopes, prescription pads, cartoons clipped from magazines, empty phials, a brass letter opener, a blue box of loose cotton, and an omega-shaped silver clamp. His sanctum had two parts: this, the one where his desk, his chairs, his table of surgical tools, his scales, his eye-chart, and his potted plants were situated, and, beyond his desk and a partition of frosted glass, the other, the innermost sanctum, where his medicines were stored on shelves like bottles of wine and jugs of jewels. To here he would retire at the end of a consultation, emerging in time with a little labelled bottle or two, and from here at all times issued a complex medicinal fragrance compounded of candy, menthol, ammonia, and dried herbs. This cloud of healing odor could be sniffed even in the vestibule that contained the mat, the print, and the stucco umbrella stand. The doctor pivoted in his swivel chair and faced us; his bald head was not like Minor Kretz’s, which declared in its glittering knobs the plates and furrows of his skull. Doc Appleton’s was a smooth luminous rise of skin lightly flecked with a few pinker spots that only I, probably, would have noticed and recognized as psoriasis.

  He pointed his thumb at my father. “You see, George,” he said, “you believe in the soul. You believe your body is like a horse you get up on and ride for a while and then get off. You ride your body too hard. You show it no love. This is not natural. This builds up nervous tension.”

  My stool was uncomfortable and Doc Appleton’s philosophizing always afflicted me with embarrassment. I deduced that the verdict had already been handed down and from the fact that the doctor felt leisure to be boring I deduced that the verdict had been favorable. Still I remained in some suspense and studied the table of wiggly probes and angled scissors as if they were an alphabet in which I could read the word. AI AI, they said. Among these silver exclamations—needles and arrows and polished clamps—there was that strange hammer for tapping your knee to make your leg jerk. It was a heavy triangle of red rubber fixed in a silver handle made concave to improve the doctor’s grip. My very first trips to this office that I could remember centered about that hammer, and the table of instruments took its center from this arrowhead of sullen orange as if from something very ancient. It was the shape of an arrowhead but also of a fulcrum and as I watched it it seemed to sink, sink with its infinitesimal cracks and roundnesses of use and age, sink down through time and to be at the bottom sufficiently simple and ponderous to make there a pivot for everything.

  “… know thyself, George,” Doc Appleton was saying. His pink firm palm, round as a child’s, lifted in admonition. “Now how long have you been teaching?”

  “Fourteen years,” my father said. “I was laid off late in ’31 and was out of work the whole year the kid was born. In the summer of ’33, Al Hummel, who as you know is Pop Kramer’s nephew, came up to the house and suggested—”

  “Does your father enjoy teaching? Peter.”

  It took me a second to realize I had been addressed. “I don’t know,” I said, “at times I suppose.” Then I thought and added, “No, I guess he doesn’t.”

  “It’d be O. K.,” my father said, “if I thought I was any good at it. But I don’t have the gift of discipline. My father, the poor devil, didn’t have it either.”

  “You’re not a teacher,” Doc Appleton told him. “You’re a learner. This creates tension. Tension creates excess gastric juice. Now George, the symptoms you describe might be merely mucinous colitis. Constant irritation of the digestive track can produce pain and the sensation of anal fullness you describe. Until the X-ray, we’ll assume that’s what it is.”

  “I wouldn’t mind plugging ahead at something I wasn’t any good at,” my father said, “if I knew what the hell the point of it all was. I ask, and nobody’ll tell me.”

  “What does Zimmerman say?”

  “He doesn’t say a thing. He thrives on confusion. Zimmerman has the gift of discipline and us poor devils under him who don’t have it, he just laughs at us. I can hear him laughing every time the clock ticks.”

  “Zimmerman and myself,” Doc Appleton said, and sighed, “have never seen eye to eye. I went to school with him, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  My father was lying. Even I had known that, Doc Appleton said it so often. Zimmerman was a chafe to him, a lifelong sore point. I was furious with my father for being so obsequious, for laying us both open this way to a long and often-chewed story.

 
“Why, yes,” Doc Appleton said, blinking in surprise that my father should be ignorant of such a famous fact. “We went all through the Olinger schools together.” He leaned back in the chair that fitted him so exquisitely. “Now when we were born here it wasn’t called Olinger, it was called Tilden, in honor of the man who got cheated out of the election. Old Pappy Olinger was still farming all that land to the north of the pike and east of where the cardboard box factory is now. I remember seeing him take his team into Alton, a little old fella not five feet tall with a black hat and a mustache you could have wiped your table silver on. He had three sons: Cot, who went crazy one night and killed two steer with a hand hoe, Brian, who had a child by the Negro woman they had to work in the kitchen, and Guy, the youngest, who sold the land to the real estate developers and died of trying to eat the money up. Cot, Brian, and Guy: they’re all beneath the ground now. Now what did I start to say?”

  “About you and Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.

  My impudent impatience was not lost on him; he looked over my father’s shoulder at me and his lower lip slid thoughtfully to one side and then to the other. “Ah, yes,” he pronounced, and spoke to my father. “Well, Louis and I went through the grades together when they were scattered all over the borough. First and second grade was over by Pebble Creek where they put the parking lot for the new diner; third and fourth grades were in Mrs. Eberhardt’s barn that she rented the town for a dollar a year; fifth and sixth were in a stone building on what they used to call the Black Acres, because the loam was so deep, over beyond where the race track used to be. Whenever they’d hold a weekday race, on Tuesdays usually, they used to let us out of class because they needed boys to hold and comb the horses. Then for those that kept on past sixth grade, by the time I was the age they had built the high school at the Elm Street corner. Now didn’t that look grand to us then! That’s the building, Peter, where you went to elementary school.”