The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  Cattycorner across from the trophy case with its hundred highlights, Zimmerman’s door is shut. As Caldwell strides by, it pops open and Mrs. Herzog steps out at a slant under his nose. She is as startled as he; her eyes widen behind her cockeyed butterscotch hornrims and her peacock-feathered hat sits crooked as if with shock. She is, from Caldwell’s height of age, a young woman; her oldest child has just reached the seventh grade. Already, ripples of protective agitation are spreading upwards from this child through the faculty. She got herself elected to the school board to guarantee personally her children’s education. From his professional heart, Caldwell despises these meddling mothers; they haven’t a clue as to what education is: a jungle, an unholy mess. Arrogantly her mouth in its blurred purplish lipstick refuses to frame a smile of confessed surprise, instead remaining ajar in frank amazement, like a stuck letter slot.

  Caldwell breaks the silence. An urchin’s impudence, revived from deep in his childhood by the forgotten sensation of nearly having his nose socked, dimples his face as he tells her, Mrs. Herzog of the school board, “Boy, the way you came out of that door reminded me of a cuckoo clock!”

  Her air of interrupted dignity, ridiculous in one not yet out of her thirties and leaning her weight on a doorknob, freezes the harder at this greeting. With glassied eyes he resumes his walk to the end of the hall. Not until he has bucked open the wire-reinforced double doors and started down the steps under the yellow wall where since yesterday the word FUCK has been scrubbed away, does the fist sink into his stomach. His goose, cooked. What in hell had the pushy bitch been doing in there? He had felt Zimmerman’s presence behind her in his office, a dark cloud; he could feel Zimmerman’s atmosphere through a keyhole. She had shoved open the door like a woman making a point at her back and not dreaming her front was exposed. Caldwell in his present state cannot afford another enemy. Tickets 18001 to 18145, Zimmerman’s report saying in black and blue that he hit the kid in class, and now this: bumping into Mim Herzog with her lipstick smeared. A bubble expands in his throat and, stepping into the open, he takes in fresh air with a gasp as sharp as a sob. Blurred crimped clouds have been lowered tangent to the town’s slate roofs. The roofs seem greasily lustrous with sullen inner knowledge. The atmosphere feels pregnant with a hastening fate. Lifting his head and sniffing, Caldwell experiences a vivid urge to walk on faster, to canter right past Hummel’s, to romp neighing through the front door and out the back door of any house in Olinger that stood in his way, to gallop up the brushy brown winter-burned flank of Shale Hill and on, on, over hills that grow smoother and bluer with distance, on and on on a southeast course cutting diagonally across highways and rivers frozen solid as highways until at last he drops, his head in death extended toward Baltimore.

  The herd has deserted Minor’s. Only three persons inhabit the luncheonette: Minor himself, Johnny Dedman, and that atrocious ego Peter Caldwell, the science teacher’s son. All but the shiftless and homeless are at their own tables at this hour. Five-forty. Next door, the post office has closed. Mrs. Passify, moving tenderly on worn legs, lowers the grates on the windows and eases shut the drawers colorful with stamps and inserts the counted money into the mock-Corinthian safe. Behind her, the back room seems a battlefield hospital where gray mail sacks lie unconscious, steeped in an anesthesia of shadows, prone, misshapen, and disembowelled. She sighs and goes to the window. To a passerby on the pavement her great round face would seem the face of a grotesquely swollen child straining to peek out of a tiny port-hole, the goldleaf O at the zenith of the arc of letters spelling POST OFFICE.

  Beside her, Minor methodically twists his coarse white cloth into the steaming throat of each Coca-Cola glass before he sets it down on the towel he has spread beside his sink. Each glass continues to give off a few wisps of mist as the cool air licks it. Through his window, which is beginning to fog, the pike is ripe with cars hurrying home—a laden branch whose fruit glows. The luncheonette behind him is all but empty, like a stage. It has been supporting a debate. Within, Minor is a cauldron of rage; his hairy nostrils seem seething vents.

  “Minor,” Peter calls from his booth, “you’re old-fashioned. There’s nothing wrong with Communism. In twenty years we’ll have it in this country and you’ll be happy as a clam.”

  Minor turns from the window, dome flashing, brain raging. “If old FDR had lived we’d have it,” he says, and laughs angrily, so that his nostrils spread under the burst of pressure “But he went and killed himself, or else he died of syphilis. God’s judgement: mark my words.”

  “Minor, you don’t believe that. You couldn’t be sane and believe that.”

  “I believe it,” Minor says. “He was rotten in the head when he went to Yalta or we wouldn’t be in the fix we are now.”

  “What fix? What fix, Minor? This country is sitting on top of the world. We got the big bomb and we got the big bombers.”

  “Arrrhh.” Minor turns away.

  “What fix? What fix, Minor? What fix?”

  He turns back and says, “The Ruskies’ll be in France and Italy before the year’s over.”

  “So what? So what, Minor? Communism has to come, one way or another; it’s the only way to beat poverty.”

  Johnny Dedman in a separate booth is smoking his eighth Camel of the hour and is trying to blow one smoke ring through another. Now he cries, without warning, the word “War!” and with his finger rat-tat-tats the big brown button knotted onto the end of the light cord above his head.

  Minor comes back in his narrow runway behind the counter the better to address the boys in their dim booths. “We should’ve kept marching when we hit the Elbe and taken Moscow when we had the chance. They were rotten and ready for us, the Russian soldier is the most cowardly in the world. The peasants would have risen up to greet us. That’s what old Churchill wanted us to do, and he was right. He was a crook but clever, clever. He didn’t love Old Joe. Nobody in the world loved Old Joe but King Franklin.”

  Peter says, “Minor, you really are insane. What about Leningrad? They weren’t cowardly then.”

  “They didn’t win it. They did not win it. Our equipment won it. Our tanks. Our guns. Sent courtesy free parcel post by your good friend FDR; he robbed the American people to save the Russians who then turn right around and are ready to march this minute over the Alps into Italy.”

  “He was trying to beat Hitler, Minor. Don’t you remember? Adolf H-I-T-L-E-R.”

  “I love Hitler,” Johnny Dedman announces. “He’s alive in Argentina.”

  “Minor loved him too,” Peter says, reedy-voiced with fury and hot in all his limbs. “Didn’t you, Minor? Didn’t you think Hitler was a nice man?”

  “I never did,” Minor says. “But I’ll tell you this, I’d rather have Hitler alive than old Joe Stalin. There is the Devil Incarnate. You mark my words.”

  “Minor, what do you have against Communism? They wouldn’t make you go to work. You’re too old. You’re too sick.”

  “Bam. Bam,” Johnny Dedman cries. “We should’ve dropped an atom bomb on Moscow, Berlin, Paris, France, Italy, Mexico City, and Africa. Ka-Pow. I love that mushroom-shaped cloud.”

  “Minor,” Peter says. “Minor. Why do you exploit us poor teenagers so ruthlessly? Why are you so brutal? You’ve got the board of the pinball machine tilted so steeply nobody except Dedman can get any free games out of it and he’s a genius.”

  “I am a genius,” Dedman says.

  “They don’t even believe in a Divine Creator,” Minor states.

  “Well, my God, who does?” Peter exclaims, blushing for himself but unable to halt, so anxious is he to pin this man who with his black Republican stupidity and stubborn animal vigor embodies everything in the world that is killing Peter’s father; he has to keep Minor from turning his back, he has to hold, as it were, the world open. “You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. Really.” Yet in this boast, now that it is issued, Peter perceives an abysmal betrayal of his father. In his mind he sees his father slip into a pit
stunned. He waits, so hungrily his mouth feels parched, for Minor’s rejoinder, whatever it might be, so that in the twists and detours of argument he can find a way to retract. So much of Peter’s energy is spent in wishing he could take back things he has said.

  “I believe you,” Minor says simply, turning. The way out is sealed.

  “In two years,” Johnny Dedman estimates aloud, “there’ll be a war. I’ll be a major. Minor will be a first sergeant. Peter will be peeling potatoes in the back of the kitchen, behind the garbage pails.” He softly blows one swelling smoke ring and then, the miracle, makes his mouth as tiny and tight as a keyhole and puffs out a smaller ring which, spinning quickly, passes through the larger. At the moment of interpenetration both blur, and a loose cloud of smoke lengthens like an arm reaching for the light-cord. Dedman sighs, a bored creator.

  “Rotten in the head at Yalta,” Minor calls from far up the counter, “and Truman at Potsdam as dumb as they come. That man was so dumb his haberdashery store went bankrupt and the next minute he’s running the United States of America.”

  The door bucks open, and the darkness on the porch materializes into a hard figure in a bullet cap. “Peter here?” it asks.

  “Mr. Caldwell,” Minor says in that basso he reserves for greeting adults. “Yes he is. He was just telling me he’s an atheistic Communist.”

  “He just does that to kid you. You know that. There isn’t a man in town he thinks more of than Minor Kretz. You’re a father to that boy, and don’t think his mother and I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Hey Daddy,” Peter calls, embarrassed for him.

  Caldwell comes back toward the booths, blinking; he seems unable to find his son. He stops at Dedman’s booth. “Who’s this? Oh. Dedman. Haven’t they got you graduated yet?”

  “Hi there George,” Dedman says. Caldwell does not expect much from his students but he does expect the dignity of formal address. Of course they sense this. Cruelty is clever where goodness is imbecile. “I hear your swimming team lost again. What does that make it? Eighty in a row?”

  “They tried,” Caldwell tells him. “If you don’t have the cards, you can’t manufacture ’em.”

  “Hey, I got some cards,” Dedman says, his cheeks glowing ripely, his long lashes curled. “Look at my cards, George.” He reaches into the pocket of his forest-green shirt for the pornographic deck.

  “Put them away,” Minor calls from far up in his runway. Electric light bleaches his skull and strikes cool sparks from the dried Coke glasses.

  Caldwell does not seem to hear. He walks on to the booth where his son sits smoking a Kool. Giving no sign of seeing the cigarette, he slides in opposite Peter and says, “Jesus, a funny thing happened to me just now.”

  “What? How is the car?”

  “The car, believe it or not, is fixed. I don’t know how Hummel does it; he’s what you call a master of his trade. He’s treated me swell all my life.” A new thought pricks him and he turns his head. “Dedman? You still here?”

  Dedman has been holding his cards in his lap and fanning through them. He looks up, eyes bright. “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you quit school and get a job with Hummel? As I remember, you’re a natural mechanic.”

  The boy shrugs uncomfortably under this unexpected thrust of concern. He says, “I’m waiting for the war.”

  “You’ll wait until Doomsday, kid,” the teacher calls to him. “Don’t bury your talent in the ground. Let your light shine. If I had your mechanical talent, this poor kid here would be eating caviar.”

  “I got a police record.”

  “So did Bing Crosby. So did St. Paul. They didn’t let that stop ’em. Don’t use it as a crutch. You talk to Al Hummel. I never had a better friend in this town, and I was in worse shape than you are. You’re just eighteen; I was thirty-five.”

  Agitated, Peter takes a puff made hopelessly awkward by his father’s presence and stubs out his Kool half-smoked. He yearns to divert his father from this conversation, which he knows Dedman in retelling will make into a joke. “Daddy, what was the funny thing?” He is overswept, as the smoke soaks his lungs with its mild poison, by a wave of distaste for all this mediocre, fruitless, cloying involvement. Somewhere there is a city where he will be free.

  His father speaks so only he can hear. “I was walking through the hall ten minutes ago and Zimmerman’s door bumps open and who the hell pops out but Mrs. Herzog.”

  “Well what’s so funny about that? She’s on the school board.”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I guess you’re old enough now; she looked loved up.”

  Peter giggles in surprise. “Loved up?” He laughs again and regrets having stubbed out his cigarette, which now seems priggish.

  “There’s a look women get. In their faces. She had it, until she saw me.”

  “But how? Was she wearing all her clothes?”

  “Sure, but her hat looked crooked. And her lipstick had been smeared.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh is right. It’s something I wasn’t meant to see.”

  “Well it’s not your fault, you were just walking down the hall.”

  “That doesn’t matter, it wasn’t my fault; if that was the rule nothing is ever anybody’s fault. The fact is, kid, I walked right into a nest of trouble; Zimmerman’s been playing cat-and-mouse with me for fifteen years and this is the end of the line.”

  “Oh, Daddy. Your imagination is so fertile. She was probably in there consulting about something, you know Zimmerman makes appointments for all hours.”

  “You didn’t see the look in her eyes when she saw me.”

  “Well what did you do?”

  “I just give her the old sweet smile and keep going. But the cat is out of the bag and she knows it.”

  “Daddy, now let’s be rational. Would she be capable of anything with Zimmerman? She’s a middle-aged woman, isn’t she?”

  Peter wonders why his father smiles. Caldwell says, “She has a kind of name around town. She’s a good ten years younger than Herzog; she didn’t marry him until he’d made his pot.”

  “But Daddy, she has a child in the seventh grade.” Peter is exasperated at his father’s inability to see the obvious, that women who run for the school board are beyond sex, that sex is for adolescents. He does not know how to put this to his father delicately. Indeed, the juxtaposition of his father and this subject is so stressful that his tongue feels locked in the bind.

  His father kneads his brown-spotted hands together so hard that the knuckles turn yellow. He moans, “I could feel Zimmerman sitting in there like a big heavy raincloud; I can feel him on my chest right now.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” Peter snaps. “You’re ridiculous. Why do you make such a mountain out of a molehill? Zimmerman doesn’t even exist in the way you see him. He’s just a slippery old fathead who likes to pat the girls.”

  His father looks up, cheeks slack, startled. “I wish I had your self-confidence, Peter,” he says. “If I had your self-confidence I would’ve taken your mother onto the Burly-cue stage and you never would have been born.” This is as close to a rebuke of his son as he ever came. The boy’s cheeks burn. Caldwell says, “I better call her,” and heaves himself up out of the booth. “I can’t get it out of my head that Pop Kramer is going to fall down those stairs. If I live I’m determined to put up a bannister.”

  Peter follows him to the front of the luncheonette. “Minor,” Caldwell asks, “would it break your heart if I asked you to break a ten-dollar bill?” As Minor takes the bill, Caldwell asks him, “When do you think the Russians will reach Olinger? They’re probably getting on the trolley up at Ely now.”

  “Like son, like father, huh Minor?” Johnny Dedman calls from his booth.

  “Is there any special way you want this?” Minor asks, displeased.

  “A five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel.” Caldwell goes on, “I hope they do come. It would be the best thing that happened to this to
wn since the Indians left. They’d line us up against the wall of the post office and put us out of our misery, old bucks like you and me.”

  Minor doesn’t want to hear it. He snorts so angrily that Caldwell asks in a high pained voice, his searching voice, “Well what do you think the answer is? We’re all too dumb to die by ourselves.”

  As usual, he receives no answer. He accepts the change in silence and gives Peter the five.

  “What’s this for?”

  “To eat on. Man is a mammal that must eat. We can’t ask Minor to feed you for free, though he’s gentleman enough to do it, I know he is.”

  “But where did you get it?”

  “It’s O. K.”

  By this Peter understands that his father has again borrowed from the school athletic funds that are placed in his trust. Peter understands nothing of his father’s financial involvements except that they are confused and dangerous. Once as a child, four years ago, he had a dream in which his father was called to account. Face ashen, his father, clad in only a cardboard grocery box beneath which his naked legs showed spindly and yellowish, staggered down the steps of the town hall while a crowd of Olingerites cursed and laughed and threw pulpy dark objects that struck the box with a deadened thump. In that way we have in dreams, where we are both author and character, God and Adam, Peter understood that inside the town hall there had been a trial. His father had been found guilty, stripped of everything he owned, flogged, and sent forth into the world lower than the hoboes. From his pallor plainly the disgrace would kill him. In his dream Peter shouted, “No! You don’t understand! Wait!” The words came out in a child’s voice. He tried to explain aloud to the angry townspeople how innocent his father was, how overworked. worried, conscientious, and anxious; but the legs of the crowd shoved and smothered him and he could not make his voice heard. He woke up with nothing explained. So now, in the luncheonette, it feels to him as if he is accepting a piece of his father’s flayed skin and inserting it into his wallet to be spent on hamburgers, lemon Pepsis, the pinball machine, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups whose chocolate is terrible for his psoriasis.