by John Updike
Alton distended. Her arms of white traffic stretched riverward. Her shining hair fanned on the surface of the lake. My sense of myself amplified until, lover and loved, seer and seen, I compounded in several accented expansions my ego, the city, and the future, and during these seconds truly clove to the center of the sphere, and outmuscled time and tide. I would triumph. Yet the city shuffled and winked beyond the window unmoved, transparent to my penetration, and her dismissal dwindled me terribly. Hurrying as if my smallness were so many melting crystals which would vanish altogether if not gathered swiftly, I partially redressed and got into the bed nearest the wall; the cold sheets parted like leaves of marble, and I felt myself a dry seed lost in the folds of earth. Dear God, forgive me, forgive me, bless my father, my mother, my grandfather, now let me sleep.
As the sheets warmed, I enlarged to human size, and then, as the dissolution of drowsiness crept toward me, a sensation, both vivid and numb, of enormity entered my cells, and I seemed a giant who included in his fingernail all the galaxies that are. This sensation operated not only in space but in time; it seemed, as literally as one says “a minute,” an eternity since I had risen from bed, put on my bright red shirt, stamped my foot at my mother, patted the dog through the frosted metal mesh, and drunk orange juice. These things seemed performed in photographs projected on a mist at the distance of the stars; they mixed with Lauren Bacall and Doris Day and via their faces I was returned to the bracing plane of everyday. I became aware of details: a distant rumble of voices, a spiral of wire holding together the leg of a chair a few feet from my face, the annoying flicker of lights on the walls. I got out of bed and lowered the shade and returned to bed. How warm the room was, compared with my room at Firetown! I thought of my mother and for the first time missed her; I longed to inhale her scent of cereal and to forget myself in watching her plod back and forth in our kitchen. When I saw her again I must tell her I understood why she moved us to the farm and that I did not blame her. And I must show my grandfather more respect and listen when he talks because … because … he will not always be with us.
My father seemed to come into the room at this moment, so I must have fallen asleep. My lips felt swollen, my bare legs boneless and long. His great shadow cut across the strip of pink light that the lowered shade left standing along the wall by the corner. I heard him set my books down on our table. “You asleep, Peter?”
“No. Where have you been?”
“I called your mother and Al Hummel. Your mother tells me to tell you not to worry about anything, and Al’s going to send his truck in for the car in the morning. He thinks it sounds like the driveshaft and he’ll try to get second-hand parts for me.”
“How do you feel?”
“O. K. I was talking to an awfully nice gentleman downstairs in the lobby; he travels all over the East consulting with these big stores and companies about their advertising programs and clears twenty thousand a year with a two-month vacation. I told him that was the kind of creative work you were interested in and he said he’d like to meet you. I thought of coming up to get you but figured you could probably use the sleep.”
“Thanks,” I said. His shadow cut back and forth across the light as he took off his coat, his tie, his shirt.
His voice chuckled. “The hell with him, huh? I guess that’s the attitude to take. A man like that would walk over your dead body to grab a nickel. That’s the kind of bastard I’ve done business with all my life; they’re too smart for me.”
When he got into bed, after his body stopped rustling the sheets, there was a pause, and he said, “Don’t worry about your old man, Peter. In God we trust.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “Good night.”
There was another pause, and then the darkness spoke: “Pleasant dreams, as Pop would say.” And his evoking my grandfather unexpectedly did make this strange room safe enough to sleep in, though a woman’s voice giggled down the hall, and doors kept slamming above and below us.
My sleep was simple and deep and my dreams scanty. When I awoke, all I remembered was being in an endless chemical laboratory, like a multiplication with mirrors of the basins and test tubes and Bunsen burners in Room 107 at Olinger High. There was on a table a small Mason jar such as my grandmother used to put up applesauce in. Its glass was clouded. I picked it up and put my ear to the lid and heard a tiny voice, as high in pitch as the voice that calls numbers in a hearing test, saying with a microscopic distinctness, “I want to die. I want to die.”
My father was already up and dressed. He stood by the window, its shade raised, and looked down at the city stirring itself into the gray morning. The sky was not clear; clouds like the undersides of long buns unrolled beyond the brick horizon of the city. He opened a window, to savor Alton, and the air tasted different from yesterday’s: milder, preparatory, stirred. Something had moved nearer.
Downstairs, our clerk had been replaced by a younger man, who stood straight and did not smile. “Has the old gentleman gone off duty?” my father asked.
“It’s a funny thing,” the new clerk said, without smiling at all. “Charlie died last night.”
“Huh? How could he do that?”
“I don’t know. It happened around two in the morning, they said. I wasn’t supposed to come on until eight. He just got up from the desk and went into the men’s room and died on the floor. Heart, it must have been. Didn’t the ambulance wake you?”
“Was that siren for my friend? I can’t believe what you’re saying. He was a wonderful Christian to us.”
“I didn’t know him very well myself.” The clerk accepted my father’s check only after a long explanation, and with a doubtful grimace.
My father and I scraped together the change in our pockets and found enough for breakfast at a diner. I had one dollar in my wallet but did not tell him, intending it to be a surprise when things got more desperate. The counter of the diner was lined with workmen soft-eyed and gruff from behind half-asleep still. I was relieved to see that the man working the griddle was not our hitchhiker. I ordered pancakes and bacon and it was the best breakfast I had had in months. My father ordered Wheaties, mushed the cereal into the milk, ate a few bites, and pushed it away. He looked at the clock. It said 7:25. He bit back a belch; his face whitened and the skin under his eyes seemed to sink against the socket bone. He saw me studying him in alarm and said, “I know. I look like the devil. I’ll shave in the boiler room over at school, Heller has a razor.” The pale grizzle, like a morning’s frost, of a day-old beard covered his cheeks and chin.
We left the diner and walked south toward the high dull owl of dead tubing. A tenuous winter mist, released by the rise in temperature, licked the damp cement and asphalt. We boarded a trolley at Fifth and Weiser. The interior was gay with the straw of the seats, and warm and nearly empty. Few other people were heading outwards against the pull of the city. Alton thinned; the row houses split like ice breaking; a distant hill was half tranced green and half new pastel houses; and after the long gliding stretch beyond the ice-cream stand crowned by a great plaster replica of a cone, the motley brick houses of Olinger took hold around us. The school grounds and then the salmon-brick school appeared on the left; the boilerhouse smokestack admonished the sky like a steeple. We got out by Hummel’s Garage. Our Buick was not there yet. We were not late today; cars were still nosing into their slots. An orange bus racily heaved through a loop and swayed to a stop; students the size of birds, colored in bright patches, no two alike, tumbled from the doors in pairs.
As my father and I strode along the pavement that divided the school side lawn from Hummel’s alley, a little whirlwind sprang up before us and led us along. Leaves long dead and brittle as old butterfly wings, an aqua candy wrapper, flecks and dust and seed-sized snips of gutter chaff all hurried in a rustling revolution under our eyes; a distinctly circular invisible presence outlined itself on the walk. It danced from one margin of grass to another and sighed its senseless word; my instinct was to halt bu
t my father kept striding. His pants flapped, something sucked my ankles, I closed my eyes. When I looked behind us, the whirlwind was nowhere to be seen.
In the school we parted. A student, I was held by regulations to this side of the wire-reinforced doors. He pushed through and walked down the long hall, his head held high, his hair fluffed from the removal of his blue knit cap, his heels pounding the varnished boards. Smaller and smaller he grew along their perspective; at the far door he became a shadow, a moth, impaled on the light he pressed against. The door yielded; he disappeared. With a grip of sweat, terror seized me.
V
GEORGE W. CALDWELL, teacher, 50.
Mr. Caldwell was born December 21st, 1896, on Staten Island, New York City. His father was the Reverend John Wesley Caldwell, a graduate of Princeton University and the Union Theological Seminary, New York. Upon graduation from the latter place he entered the Presbyterian ministry, making his the fifth generation of clergymen supplied by the Caldwell family to this denomination. His wife, née Phyllis Harthorne, was of Southern extraction, hailing from the near environs of Nashville, Tennessee. To their marriage she not only brought her great personal beauty and charm but the energetic piety characteristic of Southern gentlewomen. Countless parishioners were to stand indebted to her example of devotion and Christian testimony; when, at the tragically early age of forty-nine, her husband was called to move “from strength to strength” in the Higher Service, it was she who, in the difficult year of his lingering illness, carried on the work of the church, on several Sundays herself mounting into the pulpit.
The couple was blessed with two offspring, of which George was the second. In March of 1900, when George was three, his father resigned his Staten Island pastorate and accepted the call of the First Presbyterian Church of Passaic, New Jersey, at the corner of Grove Street and Passaic Avenue—a splendid structure of yellow limestone still standing and recently enlarged. It was here that for two decades John Caldwell was destined to shed his learning, wry wit, and firmly held faith upon the upturned faces of his flock. So it was that Passaic, of old called Acquackanonk, a gentle river town whose rural beauties were at that time far from eclipsed by the vigor of its industry, came to be the seat of George Caldwell’s rearing.
Many still living in this city remember him as a cheerful boy, adept at all sports and as skilled in retaining friends as at making them. His nickname was “Sticks”—presumably an allusion to an unusual physical thinness. Following his father’s intellectual bent, he showed an early interest in formal science, though in later years he claimed, with the joking modesty so intrinsic to the man, that the height of his ambition was to become a druggist. Fortunately for a generation of Olinger students, Fate decreed otherwise.
Mr. Caldwell’s young manhood was troubled by the premature death of his father and by America’s participation in the First World War. An instinctive and natural patriot, he enlisted in the Headquarters Troop of the Seventy-Eighth Division late in 1917 and narrowly survived, at Fort Dix, the great flu epidemic which was then sweeping the camps. He stood ready, Serial No. 2414792, for overseas duty when the Armistice was declared; George Caldwell would never again come so close to leaving the continental boundaries of the nation he was to enrich as worker, teacher, churchman, civic leader, son, husband, and father.
In the years following his military discharge, George Caldwell, now—with his sister, who had married—his mother’s sole support, was engaged at a variety of jobs: as a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias, as the driver of a sightseeing bus in Atlantic City, as athletic supervisor in the Paterson Y. M. C. A., as a railroad fireman on the New York, Susquehanna, and Western Line, and even as a hotel bellhop and restaurant dishwasher. In 1920 he enrolled in Lake College, near Philadelphia, and, with no financial assistance save that engendered by his own efforts, succeeded in graduating with distinction in 1924, having majored in chemistry. While compiling an excellent academic record and sustaining a demanding schedule of part-time employment, he as well earned an athletic scholarship that reduced his tuition by half. For three years a guard on the Lake football varsity, he suffered a broken nose a total of seventeen times, a severely dislocated kneecap twice, and a leg and a collarbone fracture once each. It was there, on the lovely campus whose central jewel is the shining oak-lined lake deemed sacred by the Lenni Lenape (the “Original People”), that he met and was enchanted by Miss Catherine Kramer, whose family were indigenous to the Fire Township region of Alton County. In 1926 the couple married, in Hagerstown, Maryland, and for the next half-decade travelled widely through the Middle Atlantic States including Ohio and West Virginia, George being employed, as cable splicer, by the Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company.
“Blessings come in strange disguises.” In 1931 the national destiny again intruded upon the personal; due to the economic disturbances sweeping the United States, George Caldwell was dropped from the pay rolls of the industrial giant he had so conscientiously served. He and his wife, who was shortly to enlarge George Caldwell’s responsibilities by another human soul, came to live with her parents, in Olinger, where Mr. Kramer had several years before purchased the handsome white brick house on Buchanan Road presently occupied by Dr. Potter. In the fall of 1933 Mr. Caldwell took up teaching duties at Olinger High School, duties he was never to put down.
How to express the quality of his teaching? A thorough mastery of his subjects, an inexhaustible sympathy for the scholastic underdog, a unique ability to make unexpected connections and to mix in an always fresh and eye-opening way the stuff of lessons with the stuff of life, an effortless humor, a by no means negligible gift for dramatization, a restless and doubting temperament that urged him forward ceaselessly toward self-improvement in the pedagogic craft—these are only parts of the whole. What endures, perhaps, most indelibly in the minds of his ex-students (of whom this present writer counts himself one) was his more-than-human selflessness, a total concern for the world at large which left him, perhaps, too little margin for self-indulgence and satisfied repose. To sit under Mr. Caldwell was to lift up one’s head in aspiration. Though there was sometimes—so strenuous and unpatterned was his involvement with his class—confusion, there was never any confusion that indeed “Here was a man.”
In addition to a full load of extra-curricular school activities, including the coaching of our gallant swimming team, the management of all football, basketball, track and baseball tickets, and the supervision of the Communications Club, Mr. Caldwell played a giant’s role in the affairs of the community. He was secretary of the Olinger Boosters’ Club, Counsellor to Cub Pack 12, member of the Committee to Propose a Borough Park, vice-president of the Lions and chairman of that service club’s annual light-bulb-selling campaign for the benefit of blind children. During the recent War he was Block Warden and a willing instrument in many aspects of the Effort. Born a Republican and a Presbyterian, he became a Democrat and a Lutheran, and was a staunch contributor to both causes. For many years a deacon and church-council member of the Redeemer Lutheran Church of Olinger, upon recently moving to a charming rural house in Firetown, his wife’s family “homestead,” Mr. Caldwell promptly became a deacon and member of the council of the Firetown Evangelical-Lutheran church body. Such a tabulation by its very nature cannot include the countless nameless works of charity and good will by which he, originally an alien to the town of Olinger, wove himself so securely into its fabric of citizenship and fellowship.
He is survived by a sister, Alma Terrio, of Troy, New York; and by his father-in-law, his wife, and his son, all of Firetown.
VI
AS I LAY on my rock various persons visited me. First came Mr. Phillips, my father’s colleague and friend, his hair indented by the memory of a shortstop’s cap. He held up his hand for attention and made me play that game which he believed made the mind’s hands quick. “Take two,” he said rapidly, “add four, multiply by three, subtract six, divide by two, add four, what do you have?”
“Five?” I sa
id, for I had become fascinated by the nimbleness of his lips and so lost track.
“Ten,” he said, with a little rebuking shake of his inflexibly combed head. He was a tidy man in all things, and any sign of poor coördination vexed him. “Take six,” he said, “divide by three, add ten, multiply by three, add four, divide by four, what do you have?”
“I don’t know,” I said miserably. My shirt was eating my skin with fire.
“Ten,” he said, puckering sadly his rubbery mouth. “Let’s get down to business,” he said. He taught social science. “Give me the members of Truman’s cabinet. Remember the magic mnemonic phrase, ST. WAPNICAL.”
“State,” I said, “Dean Acheson,” and then I could remember no more. “But truly,” I called, “tell me, Mr. Phillips, you’re his friend. Is it possible? Where can the spirits go?”
“T,” he said, “Thanatos. Thanatos the death-demon carries off the dead. Two and three, Billy boy, easy out, easy out.” He adroitly sidestepped and stooped and snatched it up in his webbing on the short hop. He braced, pivoted in slow motion, and lobbed it over. It was a volley ball and behind me all the mountaintops began to shout. I strained to bat it back over the net but my wrists were chained with ice and brass. The ball grew eyes and a mane of hair like the cornsilk that flows from the bursting ear. Deifendorf’s face moved so close I could smell the tallow on his breath. He was holding his hands so a little lozenge-shaped crevice was formed between the balls of his palms. “What they like, you see,” he said, “is to have you in there. No matter who they are, that’s all they like, you in there working back and forth.”