The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  The pay phone is attached to the wall behind the comic book rack. With a nickel and a dime Caldwell places the call to Firetown. “Cassie? We’re in the luncheonette … It’s fixed. It was the driveshaft … He thinks about twenty bucks, he hadn’t figured out the labor yet. Tell Pop Al asked about him. Pop hasn’t fallen down the stairs yet, has he? … You know I didn’t mean that, I hope he doesn’t too … No, no I haven’t, I haven’t had a second, I gotta be at the dentist in five minutes … To tell the truth, Cassie, I’m scared to hear what he has to say … I know that … I know that … I’d guess around eleven. Have you run out of bread? I bought you an Italian sandwich last night and it’s still sitting in the car … Huh? He looks O. K., I just gave him five bucks so he can eat … I’ll put him on.”

  Caldwell holds the receiver out to Peter. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

  Peter resents that she should invade this way the luncheonette that was the center of his life apart from her. Her voice sounds tiny and stern, as if, in pinching her into this metal box, the telephone company has offended her feelings. The magnetic pull she exerts over him is transmitted through the wires, so that he too feels reduced in size.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “How does he look to you, Peter?”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Why Daddy. Who else?”

  “Kind of tired and excited, I can’t tell. You know what a puzzle he is.”

  “Are you as worried as I am?”

  “I guess so, sure.”

  “Why hasn’t he called Doc Appleton back?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t think the X-rays are developed yet.” Peter looks toward his father as if to be confirmed. The man is engaging in some elaborate apologetic exchange with Minor: “… didn’t mean to be sarcastic a minute ago about the Communists, I hate ’em as much as you do, Minor …”

  The telephone overhears and asks, “Who’s he talking to?”

  “Minor Kretz.”

  “He’s just fascinated by that kind of man, isn’t he?” the miniature female voice bitterly remarks in Peter’s ear.

  “They’re talking about the Russians.”

  A kind of cough ticks in the receiver and Peter knows his mother has started crying. His stomach sinks. He casts about for something to say, and his eye like a fly lights on one of the trick turds of painted plaster among the novelties. “How’s the dog?” he asks.

  His mother’s breathing struggles for self-control. In the intervals of her crying jags her voice becomes oddly composed and stony. “She was in the house all this morning and I finally let her run after lunch. When she came back she had been after another skunk. Pop’s so mad at me he won’t come out of his room. With no bread in the house, his temper is running short.”

  “Do you think Lady killed the skunk?”

  “I think so. She was laughing.”

  “Daddy says he’s going to the dentist.”

  “Yes. Now that it’s too late.” Another wave of silent tears spreads into Peter’s ear; his brain is flooded with the image of how his mother’s eyes would be, red-rimmed and ponderous with water. A faint grainy smell, of grass or corn, affects his nose.

  “I don’t think it’s necessarily too late,” he says. It is pompous and insincere but he is compelled to say something. All the telephone numbers teenagers have pencilled on the wall above the phone begin to swap and swirl under his eyes.

  His mother sighs. “Yes, I suppose. Peter.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take care of your father now.”

  “I’ll try. It’s hard though.”

  “Isn’t it? But he loves you so.”

  “O. K., I’ll try. Do you want him back?”

  “No.” She pauses, and then, with that theatrical talent for holding the stage that perhaps is the germ of sense in his father’s fantasy about putting her in vaudeville, she repeats with tremulous import, “No.”

  “O. K., we’ll see you around eleven then.” His mother’s mind, shorn of her comforting body, is keenly exhausting to Peter. She senses this, and sounds even more hurt, more remote, more miniature and stony. “The weatherman wants snow.”

  “Yeah, the air kind of feels like it.”

  “All right. All right, Peter. Hang up on your poor old mother. You’re a good boy. Don’t worry about anything.”

  “O. K., don’t you either. You’re a good woman.” What a thing to say to your own mother! He hangs up, amazed at himself. It makes his scabs itch, the peculiarity of talking to her over the phone, where she becomes, incestuously, a simply female voice with whom he has shared secrets.

  “Did she sound upset?” his father asks him.

  “A little. I think Pop’s throwing an atmosphere.”

  “That man can throw ’em, too.” Caldwell turns and explains to Minor. “This is my father-in-law. He’s eighty-four and he can throw an atmosphere that knocks you out of your shoes. He can throw an atmosphere right through a keyhole in a door. That man has more power in his little finger than you and I have from our bellies up.”

  “Arrh,” Minor grunts softly, setting on the counter a suds-topped glass of milk. Caldwell drains it in two gulps, puts it down, winces, turns a shade paler, and bites back a belch. “Boy,” he said, “that milk took a wrong turn down there somewhere.” He still tends to pronounce “milk” “melk,” New Jersey style. He runs his tongue back and forth across his front teeth as if to clean them. “Now I’m off to Dr. Yankem.”

  Peter asks, “Shall I go with you?” The dentist’s real name is Kenneth Schreuer and his office is two blocks down the pike, beyond the high school on the other side, opposite the tennis courts. Schreuer always has a soap opera going on the radio, from nine in the morning to six at night. On Wednesdays and Sundays from spring to fall he walks across the trolley tracks in white ducks and becomes one of the county’s better tennis players. He is a better tennis player than he is a dentist. His mother works in the school cafeteria.

  “No, hell,” Caldwell says. “What can you do, Peter? The damage is done. Don’t worry about this old heap of junk. Stay here where it’s warm and you have friends.”

  So Peter’s first piece of work in carrying out his mother’s injunction to take care of his father is to watch the suffering man, his coat unbuttoned and too short and his knit bullet cap pulled down over his ears, head out the dark door alone into one more doom.

  Johnny Dedman calls from his booth, sincerely, “Hey Peter. With you and your father standing up there against the light for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.”

  “He’s taller,” Peter says curtly. Dedman as a sincere good boy doesn’t interest him. He feels in himself with the coming of night great sweet stores of wickedness ripen. He turns, pivoting on the weight of the five dollars at his hip, and tells Minor triumphantly, “Two hamburgers. No ketchup. And a glass of your watered milk and five nickels for your rigged pinball machine.” He goes back to his booth and relights the Kool he had stubbed out half-smoked. Polar ice thrills his proud throat; he preens on the empty stage of Minor’s place positive that all the eyes in the world are watching. The stretch of necessarily idle time ahead of him, a child’s dream of freedom, so exalts his heart it beats twice as fast and threatens to burst, tinting the dim air rose. Forgive me.

  “Darling. Wait?”

  “Mm?”

  “Isn’t there some better place than your office?”

  “No. Not in winter.”

  “But we’ve been seen.”

  “You’ve been seen.”

  “But he knew. I could tell by his face that he knew. He looked as frightened as I felt.”

  “Caldwell knows and yet he doesn’t know.”

  “But do you trust him?”

  “The matter of trust has never come up between us.”

  “But now?”

  “I trust him.”

  “I don’t think you should. Couldn’t we fire him?”

  He laughs richly, disconcerting her. She is customarily slow to see he
r own humor. He says, “You overestimate my omnipotence. This man has been teaching for fifteen years. He has friends. He has tenure.”

  “But he really is incompetent, isn’t he?”

  It disagrees with him, makes an uncongenial texture, when she turns argumentative and inquisitive in his embrace. The stupidity of women has a wonderfully fresh power to disappoint him.

  “Is he? Competence is not so easy to define. He stays in the room with them, which is the most important thing. Furthermore, he’s faithful to me. He’s faithful.”

  “Why are you sticking up for him? He could destroy us both now.”

  He laughs again. “Come, come, my little bird. Human beings are harder to destroy than that.” Though her turns of anxiety are sometimes disagreeable, her physical presence profoundly relaxes him, and in his condition of innermost rest words seem to slip from him without trouble of thought, as liquid slips from high to low, as gas spins into the void.

  She becomes vehement and angular in his arms. “I don’t like that man. I don’t like his smirky childish look.”

  “His face makes you feel guilty.”

  This surprising remark turns her inquisitiveness tender. “Should we feel guilty?” The question is actually shy.

  “Absolutely. Afterwards.”

  This makes her smile, and her smiling makes her mouth soft, and in kissing her he feels he is coming at last to a small sip after an interminable thirst. That the kissing does not quench the thirst, but quickens it, so that each kiss demands a more intense successor and involves him thereby in a vortex of mounting and widening appetite—that such is the case does not seem to him a cruel but, rather, a typically generous and compelling providence of Nature.

  A tree of pain takes root in his jaw. Wait, wait! Kenny should have waited a few minutes more on the Novocain. But this is the end of the day, the boy is tired and hurried. Kenny had been one of Caldwell’s first students, back in the Thirties. Now this same boy, badly balding, braces one knee against the arm of the chair to win more leverage for the pliers which are grinding around the tooth and crushing it like chalk even as they try to twist it free. Caldwell’s fear is that the tooth will crumble between the pliers and remain in his head as a stripped and scraped nerve. Truly, the pain is unprecedented: an entire tree rich with bloom, each bloom showering into the livid blue air a coruscation of lucid lime-green sparks. He opens his eyes in disbelief that this could go on and on, and his horizon is filled with the dim pink of the dentist’s determined mouth, odorous of cloves, the lips pressed together a bit lopsidedly: a weak mouth. The kid had tried to become an M. D. but hadn’t had the I. Q. so he had settled on being a butcher. Caldwell recognizes the pain branching in his head as a consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such. The tree becomes ideally dense; its branches and blooms compound into one silver plume, cone, column of pain, a column whose height towers heavenward from a base in which Caldwell’s skull is embedded. It is pure shrill silver with not a breath, not a jot, speck, fleck of alloy in it.

  “There.” Kenneth Schreuer exhales with relief. His hands are trembling, his back is damp. He displays to Caldwell their prize in his pliers. As if emerging swollen from a dream, Caldwell with difficulty focuses. It is a little dull crumb of ivory, dappled brown and black, mounted on soft pink bow legs. It seems preposterously trivial to have resisted removal so furiously.

  “Spit,” the dentist says.

  Obediently Caldwell bends his face to the yellow basin, and a gush of blood joins the filmy swirl of clear water spinning there. The blood seems orangish and muddied with spittle. The sense of his head being pure silver yields to an airy giddiness. Fright and pressure flee through the gap in his gum. Abruptly he feels absurdly grateful for all created things, for the clean gleaming rounded lip of the circular enamel basin, for the bright little bent pipe shooting water into it, for the little comet-tail-shaped smear of rust this miniature Charybdis had worn down the section of the vortex where its momentum expires; grateful for the delicate dental smells, for the sounds of Kenny restoring his tools to the sterilizer bath, for the radio on the shelf filtering a shudder of organ music through its static. The announcer intones, “I - Love - a - Mystery!” and the organ swirls forward again, ecstatic.

  “It’s a shame,” Kenny says, “the caps of your teeth aren’t as strong as the roots.”

  “That’s the story of my life,” Caldwell says. “Big feet, weak head.” His tongue in enunciating encounters a bubbly softness. He spits again. Strange to say, he finds the sight of his blood cheering.

  With a steel tool Kenny picks at the pulled tooth, now severed forever from its earthly connection and somewhat starlike held high above the floor. Kenny gouges out a chip of black filling and puts the pick to his nostrils and sniffs. “Mm,” he says, “yes. Hopeless. This must have been giving you a good deal of pain.”

  “Only when I noticed it.”

  On the radio, the announcer explains, “We last left Doc and Reggie trapped in the great subterranean metropolis of monkeys [sound of monkeys chattering, yipping, cooing sadly] and now Doc turns to [fade] Reggie and says …”

  Doc: “We gotta get out of here! The Princess is waiting!”

  Cheepy cheep. Birrup, birrrooo.

  Kenny gives Caldwell two tablets of Anacin in a cellophane jacket. “There may be some discomfort,” he says, “when the Novocain wears off.” It never wore on, Caldwell thinks. Preparing to leave, he spits for the last time into the basin. Already the flow of his blood is slowing and thinning and yellowing. He timidly touches his tongue to the place where a slippery crater now is. A vague numb sense of loss afflicts him. Another day, another molar. (He should be writing Valentines.)

  Here comes Heller down the annex hall! Twiddle, piddle; piddle, pat!! How the man does love his own broad broom!!!

  Past the girls’ lavatory he painstakingly goes, strewing red wax and sweeping up the same in the shimmer of varnish, past Room 113 where Art the visible mirror of God’s invisible glory is held up by Miss Schrack, past 111 where typewriters lurk under tattered black shrouds through which here and there a carriage return thrusts an eerie silver hand, past 109 with its great brittle ochre map of the old trade routes whereby spice, amber, fur, and slaves were transported across Carolingian Europe, past 107 smelling of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, 105, 103, doors all shut, glass frosted, facing green lockers that dwindle to an insane perspective of zero, Heller goes, gathering under the methodical push of his broom buttons, fluff, pennies, lint, tinfoil, hairpins, cellophane, hair, thread, tangerine seeds, comb teeth, Peter Caldwell’s psoriasis scratchings, and all the undignifiable flecks and flakes and bits and motes and whatnot dust that go to make up a universe: he harvests these. He hums inaudibly an old tune to himself. He is happy. The school is his. Clocks all over the wooden acres tick in unison 6:10. In its subterranean mansion one of the vast boilers makes an irrevocable decision and swallows in a single draft a quarter-ton of hard pea coal: Pennsylvania anthracite, old Lepidodendra, pure compressed time. The furnace heart burns with a white heat that must be viewed through a mica peephole.

  Heller hugs to his rusty heart the underside of this high school. It was the promotion of his life when he was lifted from the custodial staff of the elementary building, where the little children, ticklish-tummied as lambs, daily made a puddle or two of rancid vomit to wipe up and perfume with sal ammoniac. Here there was no such indignity; only the words on the walls and now and then a malicious excremental mess in one of the male lavatories.

  The memory of people and people’s clothes touches the halls with a dry perfume. The drinking fountains wait to spurt. The radiators purr. The side door slams; a member of the JV basketball team has entered with his gym bag and gone down to the locker room. At the front entrance, Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Phillips meet on the steps and enact, one tall and one short, an Alphonse and Gaston routine as to who is to go in
the door first. Heller stoops and sweeps into his broad pan his gray mountain of dust and fluff, enlivened by a few paper scraps. He transfers this dirt to the great cardboard can waiting at this corner. Then, setting himself behind the broom, he pushes off and disappears behind the corner, piddle, pat.

  There he goes!!!!

  “George, I hear you haven’t been feeling too well,” Phillips says to the other teacher. In the light of the hall in front of the trophy case he is startled to observe a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of Caldwell’s mouth. There is usually some imperfection or oversight of grooming about the other man that secretly distresses him.

  “Sometimes up, sometimes down,” Caldwell says. “Phil, a strip of missing tickets has been preying on my mind. Numbers 18001 to 18145.”

  Phillips thinks and as he thinks takes—his habit—a jerky sidestep, as if smoothing the infield. “Well, it’s just paper,” he says.

  “So’s money,” Caldwell says.

  He looks so sick in saying it that Phillips asks, “Have you been taking anything?”

  Caldwell makes his pinched stoic mouth. “I’ll be O. K., Phil. I went to the doctor yesterday and an X-ray’s been taken.”

  Phillips sidesteps the other way. “Show anything?” he asks, looking at his shoes, as if to check the laces.