The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  As if to drown out the implications of Phillips’ extraordinary softness of voice, Caldwell virtually bellows, “I haven’t found out yet. I’ve been on the go steadily.”

  “George. May I speak as a friend?”

  “Go ahead, I’ve never heard you speak any other way.”

  “There’s one thing you haven’t learned, and that’s how to take care of yourself. You know now, we’re not as young as we were before the war; we mustn’t act like young men.”

  “Phil, I don’t know any other way to act. I’ll have to act childish until they put the half-dollars over my eyes.”

  Phillips’ laugh is a shade nervous. He had been a year on the faculty when Caldwell joined it, and though they have been through much together Phillips has never quite shaken his sense of being the other man’s senior and guide. At the same time he cannot rid himself of an obscure expectation that Caldwell out of his more chaotic and mischievous resources would produce a marvel, or at least say the strange thing that had to be said. He asks, “Did you hear about Ache?”—pronounced Ockey. A bright and respectful and athletic and handsome student from the late Thirties, the kind that does a teacher’s heart good, a kind once plentiful in Olinger but in the universal decay of virtue growing rare.

  “Killed,” Caldwell says. “But I don’t understand how.”

  “Over Nevada,” Phillips tells him, shifting his armload of papers and books to the other arm. “He was a flight instructor, and his student made a mistake. Both killed.”

  “Isn’t that funny? To go all through the war without a scratch and then get nailed in peacetime.”

  Phillips’ eyes have a morbid trick—little men are more emotional—of going red in the middle of a conversation if the subject were even remotely melancholy. “I hate it when they die young,” he blurts. He loves the well-coördinated among his students like sons, his own son being clumsy and stubborn.

  Caldwell becomes interested; his friend’s neat centrally parted cap of hair suddenly seems the lid of a casket in which might be locked the nugget of information he so needs. He asks earnestly, “Do you think it makes a difference? Are they less ready? Do you feel ready?”

  Phillips tries to direct his mind to the question but it is like trying to press the like poles of two magnets together. They push away. “I don’t know,” he admits. “They say there’s a time for everything,” he adds.

  “Not for me,” Caldwell says. “I’m not ready and it scares the hell out of me. What’s the answer?”

  There is silence between the two men while Heller passes with his broom. The janitor nods and smiles and passes them by this time.

  Again, Phillips cannot bring his mind to touch the issue squarely; it keeps shying gratefully into side issues. He stares intently at the center of Caldwell’s chest, as if a curious transition is taking place here. “Have you spoken to Zimmerman?” he asks. “Perhaps a sabbatical is the answer.”

  “I can’t afford a sabbatical. What would the kid do? He couldn’t even get to high school. He’d have to go to school in the sticks with a lot of clodhoppers on the bus.”

  “He’d survive, George.”

  “I doubt it like hell. He needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue yet. I can’t fade out before he has the clue. You’re lucky, your kid has the clue.”

  This is a sad piece of flattery that makes Phillips shake his head. The rims of his eyes deepen in tint. Ronnie Phillips, now a freshman at Penn State, is brilliant in electronics. But even while in the high school he openly ridiculed his father’s love of baseball. He bitterly felt that too many of the precious hours of his childhood had been wasted playing cat and three-stops-or-a-catch under his father’s urging.

  Phillips says weakly, “Ronnie seems to know what he wants.”

  “More power to him,” Caldwell shouts. “My poor kid, what he wants is the whole world in a candy box.”

  “I thought he wanted to paint.”

  “Ooh.” Caldwell grunts; the poison has wormed an inch deeper into his bowels. Sons are a heavy subject for these two.

  Caldwell changes the subject. “Coming out of my room today I had a kind of revelation; it’s taken me fifteen years of teaching to see it.”

  Phillips asks quickly “What?,” eager to know, for all the times he has been fooled.

  “Ignorance is bliss,” Caldwell states. Seeing no light of welcome dawn on his friend’s hopefully wrinkled face, he repeats it louder, so it echoes down the empty diminishing hall. “Ignorance is bliss. That’s the lesson I’ve gotten out of life.”

  “God help us, you may be right,” Phillips fussily exclaims, and makes as if to move toward his room. But for a minute longer the two teachers stand together in the hall, finding a measure of repose in familiar company, and some ambiguous warmth in the sense of having failed each other without blaming each other. So two steeds in the same pen huddle through a storm. If men were horses, Caldwell would have been the drudging dappled type, somewhat anonymous but not necessarily ill-bred, known as a “big gray,” and Phillips a gallant little Morgan, chestnut, with a prissy tail and nicely polished hooves—practically a pony.

  Caldwell has a last thought. “My old man went and died before he was my age,” he says, “and I didn’t want to double-cross my own kid like that.” With a yank that makes the legs chatter and screech, he pulls a small oak table, much gnawed, from its place against the wall; from off this table basketball tickets are to be sold.

  A panicked shout wells in the auditorium and lifts dust in the most remote rooms of the extensive school even while paying customers still stream through the entrance and down the glaring hall. Adolescent boys as hideous and various as gargoyles, the lobes of their ears purple with the cold, press, eyes popping, mouths flapping, under the glowing overhead globes. Girls, rosy-cheeked, glad, motley and mostly ill-made, like vases turned by a preoccupied potter, are embedded, plaid-swaddled, in the hot push. Menacing, odorous, blind, the throng gives off a muted shuffling thunder, a flickeringly articulate tinkle: the voices of the young.

  “So I said, ‘That’s your tough luck, buddy boy.’ ”

  “ I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in ”

  “I thought it was real doggy.”

  “The bitch rolled over and, no shit, said, ‘Again.’ ”

  “Use common sense. How can one infinity be larger than another?”

  “Who says he says, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “You can tell with her, because there’s this little birthmark on the side of her neck that gets red.”

  “He’s his own best lover if you ask me.”

  “Box lunch—sluurrp!”

  “I’ll put it this way to you: infinity equals infinity. Right?”

  “So then I heard that she said, so I said to him, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I guess.’ ”

  “If he can’t stop it, he shouldn’t have started it.”

  “His mouth just dropped. Literally dropped.”

  “When did it all happen, ages ago?”

  “But if you take only every odd number that exists and add them up, you still get infinity, don’t you? Do you follow that much?”

  “Was this at the one in Pottsville?”

  “ I’m in my nightie and it’s awful thi-in ”

  “ ‘Tough luck?’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes. Yours.’ ”

  “Finally,” Peter calls to Penny as she comes down the auditorium aisle and sees him. She is alone, he has a girl, she is alone, his girl has come to him alone: through the circuit of such simple thoughts his heart spins. He calls to her, “I saved you a seat.” He sits in the middle of the row; the seat he has saved for her is piled high with other students’ coats and scarves. Herolike, she swims the strait between them, pursing her complacent mouth impatiently, making others rise from their seats to let her by, laughing as she nearly tumbles on an obtruded foot. While the coats are removed from her seat, Peter and Penny are pressed together, he having half-risen. Their knees
interlock awkwardly; he playfully blows and the hair above her ear lifts. She seems, the skin of her face and throat a luminous stillness in the midst of hubbub and thumping, delicious to him, edible, succulent. Her smallness makes this succulence. She is small enough for him to lift: this thought makes him himself lift, in secrecy. The last coat is removed and they settle side by side in the happy heat and chaos.

  The players, exulting in all the space reserved for them, gallop back and forth on their plain of varnished boards. The ball arches high but not so high as the caged bulbs burning on the auditorium ceiling. A whistle blows. The clock stops. The cheerleaders rush out, the maroon O’s on their yellow sweaters bobbling, and form a locomotive. “O,” they call, seven brazen sirens, their linked forearms forming a single piston.

  “Ohh,” moans back Echo, stricken.

  “L.”

  “Hell,” is the answer, deliberately aitched, a school tradition.

  “I.”

  “Aaiii,” a cry from the depths. Peter’s scalp goes cold and under the cover of a certain actual ecstasy he grips his girl’s arm.

  “Hi,” she says, pleased, her skin still chilly from the out-of-doors.

  “N.”

  The response comes faster, “Enn,” and the cheer whirls faster and faster, a vortex between the crowd and the cheerleaders, until at its climax it seems they are all sucked down into another kingdom, “Olinger! Olinger! OLINGER!” The girls scamper back, play resumes, and the auditorium, big as it is, subsides into a living-room where everybody knows everybody else. Peter and Penny chat.

  “I’m so glad you came,” he says. “It surprises me, how glad I am.”

  “Why thank you,” Penny says dryly. “How’s your father?”

  “Frantic. We didn’t even get home last night. The car broke down.”

  “Poor Peter.”

  “No, I kind of enjoyed it.”

  “Do you shave?”

  “No. Should I? Am I ready?”

  “No; but it looks like a bit of dried shaving cream in your ear.”

  “You know what that is?”

  “What? Is it something?”

  “It’s my secret. You didn’t know I had a secret.”

  “Everybody has secrets.”

  “But mine is very special.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you. I’ll have to show you.”

  “Peter, aren’t you funny?”

  “Would you rather I didn’t? Are you frightened?”

  “No. You don’t frighten me.”

  “Good. You don’t frighten me, either.”

  She laughs. “Nobody frightens you.”

  “Now there you’re wrong. Everybody frightens me.”

  “Your father even?”

  “Oh, he’s very frightening.”

  “When will you show me your secret?”

  “Maybe I won’t. It’s too horrible.”

  “Peter, please do. Please.”

  “Listen.”

  “What?”

  “I like you.” He cannot quite say “love”; it might prove unfair.

  “I like you.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Yes I will. Are you just being silly?”

  “Partly. I’ll show you at the break. If I keep my nerve.”

  “You do frighten me now.”

  “Don’t let me. Hey. You have such beautiful skin.”

  “You always say that. Why? It’s just skin.” He can’t answer and she pulls her arm away from being stroked. “Let’s watch the game. Who’s ahead?”

  He looks up at the new combination clock and electric scoreboard, Gift of the Class of 1946. “They are.”

  She shouts, a regular lipsticked little fury suddenly, “Come on.” The JVs, five in Olinger’s maroon and gold and five in West Alton’s blue and white, looked dazed and alert at once, glued by the soles of their sneakers to tinted echoes of themselves inverted in floorshine. Every shoelace, every hair, every grimace of concentration seems unnaturally sharp, like the details of stuffed animals in a large lit case. Indeed there is a psychological pane of glass between the basketball floor and the ramp of seats; though a player can look up and spot in the crowd a girl he entered last night (her whimper, the dryness in the mouth afterwards), she is infinitely remote from him, and the event in the parked car quite possibly was imagined. Mark Youngerman with his fuzzy forearm blots sweat from his eyebrows, sees the ball sailing toward him, lifts cupped hands and cushions the tense seamed globe against his chest, flicks his head deceptively, drives in past the West Alton defender, and in a rapt moment of flight drops the peeper. The score is tied. Such a shout goes up as suggests every soul here hangs on the edge of terror.

  Caldwell is tidying up the ticket receipts as Phillips tiptoes to him and says, “George. You mentioned a missing strip.”

  “One eight oh oh one to one eight one four five.”

  “I think I’ve placed their whereabouts.”

  “Jesus, that would be a load off my mind if you had.”

  “I believe Louis has them.”

  “Zimmerman? What in hell is he stealing tickets for?”

  “Shh.” Phillips glances with an eloquent twist of his mouth in the direction of the supervising principal’s office. In him, conspiracy becomes a species of dandyism. “You know he’s the older boys’ teacher up at the Reformed Sunday School.”

  “Sure. They swear by him up there.”

  “And did you notice Reverend March coming in tonight?”

  “Yeah, I waved him through. I wouldn’t take his money.”

  “That was right. The reason he’s here, about forty of the Sunday School were given free tickets and came to the game in a group. I went up to him and suggested he sit on the stage, but he said no he thought he’d be better off standing at the rear of the auditorium and keep an eye out; about half the boys come from up in Ely, where they don’t have a Reformed Church.”

  Vera Hummel, hey, comes through the entrance. Her long yellow coat swings unbuttoned, her bun of red hair is breaking loose from its pins; has she been running? She smiles at Caldwell and nods at Phillips; Phillips is one little biddy she could never warm to. Caldwell is another matter; he brings out what might be, for all she knows, her maternal instinct. Any tall man is automatically on her good side; she is that simple. Contrariwise a man shorter than herself seems to her to be offensive. Caldwell amiably lifts one of his wart-freckled hands in greeting; the sight of her does him no harm. As long as Mrs. Hummel is on the premises he feels the school is not entirely given over to animals. She has a mature tomboy’s figure: shallow-breasted, long-legged, with something expressive and even anxious about the narrow length of her freckled wrists and forearms. The primeval female massiveness is limited to her hips and thighs; these thighs, swinging oval and alabaster from a blue gym-suit, show to fair advantage among her girls. There is a bloom that succeeds the first bloom, and then a bloom upon that. Human biology, up to a point, is not impatient. Still she remains childless. The small triangular forehead framed between two copper wings seems vexed; her nose is a fraction long and a touch pointed; there is a bit of the ferret about her face, and when she grins, gums engagingly slip into sight.

  Caldwell calls to her, “Did you have a game today?” She coaches the girls’ basketball team.

  “Just got back,” she says, not entirely halting. “We were humiliated. I just gave Al his supper and I thought I’d come see what the boys could do.”

  She is gone up the hall, toward the rear of the auditorium. “That woman certainly loves basketball,” Caldwell says.

  “Al works too long hours,” Phillips says, more darkly. “She gets bored.”

  “She’s cheerful-looking, though, and when you get to my state, that’s all that matters.”

  “George, your health worries me.”

  “The Lord loves a cheerful corpse,” Caldwell says, rudely exuberant, and asks boldly, “Now what’s the secret about these tickets?”

  “
It’s not an actual secret. Reverend March told me that Louis suggested that as an incentive to regular Sunday-school attendance a half-way prize be given, for perfect attendance up to the first of the year.”

  “So he sneaks in and swipes my basketball tickets.”

  “Not so loud. They’re not your tickets, George. They’re the school’s tickets.”

  “Well I’m the poor horse’s neck who has to account for them.”

  “It’s just paper, look at it that way. Mark it ‘Charity’ in your books. I’ll back you up if it’s ever questioned.”

  “Did you ask Zimmerman what happened to the other hundred? You said forty kids came. He can’t give away the other hundred, next thing every four-year-old in the Reformed nursery will come crawling through that door with a free ticket.”

  “George, I know you’re upset. But there’s nothing to be gained in exaggeration. I haven’t spoken to him and I don’t see that anything would be gained. Make a note for charity and we’ll consider the matter closed. Louis tends to be highhanded, I know; but it’s for a good cause.”

  Secure in his knowledge that his friend’s prudent advice must be taken, Caldwell indulges in a final verbal expenditure. “Those tickets represent ninety dollars of theoretical money; I resent like hell handing them over to the dear old Reformed Sunday School.” He means it. Olinger is, except for a few marginal sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Baptists and the Roman Catholics, divided in friendly rivalry between the Lutherans and the Reformeds, the Lutherans having an advantage of numbers and the Reformeds an advantage of wealth. Born a Presbyterian, Caldwell became in the Depression a Lutheran like his wife, and, surprisingly in one so tolerant, sincerely distrusts the Reformeds, whom he associates with Zimmerman and Calvin, whom he associates with everything murky and oppressive and arbitrary in the universal kingdom.

  Vera enters the back of the auditorium by one of the broad doors that are propped open on little rubber-footed legs which unhinge at a kick from snug brass fittings. She sees that Reverend March is over toward the corner, leaning against the stack of folding chairs that for assemblies and stage plays and P. T. A. meetings are unfolded and arranged on the flat area which is now the basketball court. Several boys, legs dangling in dungarees, perch illegally on top of this stack, and through this back area men and boys and one or two girls are standing, craning to see over one another’s shoulders, some standing on chairs set between the open doors. Two men in their middle twenties greet Vera shyly and stand aside to make room for her. She is known to them but they are forgotten by her. They are ex-heroes of the type who, for many years, until a wife or ritual drunkenness or distant employment carries them off, continue to appear at high school athletic events, like dogs tormented by a site where they imagine they have buried something precious. Increasingly old and slack, the apparition of them persists, conjured by that phantasmal procession—indoors and outdoors, fall, winter, and spring—of increasingly young and unknown high school athletes who themselves, imperceptibly, filter in behind them to watch also. Their bearing, hushed and hurt, contrasts decisively with that of the students in the slope of seats; here skins and hair and ribbons and flashy clothes make a single fabric, a billowing, twinkling human pennant. Vera squints and the crowd dissolves into oscillating atoms of color. Apparently polarized by the jiggling event before them, in fact these dots agitate sideways, toward one another, aimed by secret arrow-shaped seeds. Sensing this makes Vera proud and serene and competent. For a long time she does not deign a hint of a sideways glance in the direction of Reverend March, who for his part has been rendered rapt by the gold and copper bits of her that glitter through the intervening jostle of bodies and arrive, chinking, at his eyes.