The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  My father returned a little after one. Mrs. Hummel and I were still in the kitchen. We had been talking about a wing, an L with a screened porch, which she wanted to have built onto the back of her house; here in the summers she could sit overlooking her yard away from the traffic and noise of the pike. It would be a bower and I believed I would share it with her.

  My father looked in his bullet-head cap and snow-drenched overcoat like a man just shot from a cannon. “Boy,” he told us, “Old Man Winter made up for lost time.”

  “Where have you been?” I asked. My voice ignobly stumbled on a threat of tears.

  He looked at me as if he had forgotten I existed. “Out and around,” he said. “Over at the school. I would have gotten you up, Peter, but I figured you needed the sleep. You were beginning to look drawn as hell. Did my snoring keep you awake?”

  “No.” The snow on his coat and pants and shoes, testimony of adventure, made me jealous. Mrs. Hummel’s attention had shifted all to him; she was laughing without his even saying anything. His bumpy face was ruddy. He whipped his cap off like a boy and stamped his feet on the cocoa mat inside the door. I yearned to torment him; I became shrill. “What did you do at the school? How could you be so long?”

  “Jesus, I love that building when there aren’t any kids in it.” He was speaking not to me but to Mrs. Hummel. “What they ought to do with that brick barn, Vera, is turn the kids out on the street and let us teachers live there alone; it’s the only place I’ve ever been in my life where I didn’t feel like somebody was sitting on the back of my neck all the time.”

  She laughed and said, “They’d have to put in beds.”

  “An old Army cot is all I’d need,” he told her. “Two feet wide and six feet long; whenever I get in bed with somebody they take all the covers. I don’t mean you, Peter. Tired as I was last night I probably took ’em from you. In answer to your question, what was I doing over there, I brought all my books up to date. For the first time since last marking period everything is apple pie; I feel like they lifted a concrete block out of my belly. If I don’t show up tomorrow, the new teacher can step right in and take over, poor devil. Biff, bang; move over, buddy, next stop, the dump.”

  I had to laugh.

  Mrs. Hummel moved to her refrigerator asking, “George, have you had lunch? Can I give you a roast beef sandwich?”

  “Vera, that’s kind as hell of you. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t chew a roast beef sandwich, I had a back tooth pulled last night. I feel a hundred per cent better but it’s like the lost Atlantis in there. I had a bowl of oyster stew up at Mohnie’s. To be perfectly honest with you though, if you and the kid were having coffee, I’d take a cup. I forget if the kid drinks coffee.”

  “How can you forget it?” I asked. “I try to drink it every morning at home but there’s never any time.”

  “Jesus, that reminds me. I tried to get through to your mother but the lines are out. She doesn’t have a scrap of food in the house and if I know Pop Kramer he’ll be trying to eat the dog. Provided he hasn’t fallen down the stairs. That would be just my luck; no doctor can get in there.”

  “Well when are we going to get there?”

  “Any minute, kid, any minute. Time and tide for no man wait.” He called to Mrs. Hummel, “Never take a boy away from his mother.” Then he pinched his lips in; I knew he was wondering if this had been tactless because she, for reasons that were dark to me, had no children herself. With the pointed quiet of a servant she set the smoking coffee on the counter near him. A coil of hair came loose and trailed across her cheek like a comment. He tried to subdue the excitement in his voice and told her, “I saw Al over by Spruce Street and he’s on his way home. He and that truck have been performing miracles out there; this borough does a bang-up job when the chips are down. Traffic’s moving on everything but the alleys and the section around Shale Hill. Boy, if I was running this town we’d all be on snowshoes for a month.” He clenched and unclenched his hands happily as he gazed into this vision of confusion. “They say a trolley was derailed over in West Alton late last night.”

  Mrs. Hummel tucked back her hair and asked, “Was anybody hurt?”

  “Nobody. It jumped the rails but stayed on its feet. Our own trolleys didn’t get through to Ely until around noon. Half the stores in Alton are shut.” I marvelled at all this information and imagined him gathering it, wading through snow-banks, halting snowplows to question the drivers, running up and down raggedly heaped mounds in his too-small overcoat like an overgrown urchin. He must have circled the town while I was asleep.

  I finished my coffee and the odd torpor that my nerves had been holding at bay now was permitted to invade. I ceased to listen as my father told Mrs. Hummel of his further adventures. Mr. Hummel came in the door, gray with fatigue, and shook snow from his hair. His wife fed him lunch; when it was over he looked at me and winked. “Do you want to go home, Peter?”

  I went and put on my coat and socks and wrinkled clammy shoes and came back to the kitchen. My father took his empty cup to the sink and restored his cap to his head. “This is awfully white of you, Al; the kid and I really appreciate it.” To Mrs. Hummel he said, “Thanks a lot, Vera, you’ve treated us like princes,” and then, love, the strangest of all the strange things I have told, my father bent forward and kissed the woman on the cheek. I averted my eyes in shock and saw on the spatter-pattern linoleum floor her narrow feet in their blue slippers go up on their toes as she willingly received the kiss.

  Then her heels returned to the floor and she was holding my father’s wart-freckled hands in her own. “I’m glad you came to us,” she told him, as if they were alone. “It filled up the house for a little while.”

  When my turn to thank her came I didn’t dare a kiss and pulled my face back to indicate I was not going to give one. She smiled as she took my offered hand and then put her other hand over it. “Are your hands always so warm, Peter?”

  Outside their door, the twigs of a lilac bush had become antlers. Hummel’s truck was waiting between the pumps and the air hose; it was a middle-sized rust-splotched Chevrolet pick-up with a flaring orange plow coupled to the front bumper. When it went into gear ten different colors of rattle seemed to spring into being around us. I sat between my father and Al Hummel; there was no heater in the front and I was glad to be between the men. We drove out Buchanan Road. Our old house looked like Old Man Winter’s palace, crowned with snow and sunning itself on the broad white side where I used to bounce a tennis ball when I was a child. Along the street children in passing had shaken the snow loose from the hedges and now and then above us a loosened batch poured down in a shuffling quick cascade through the branches of a horsechestnut tree. As the houses thinned, the snow reigned undisturbed over the curved fields beyond the steady ridge, as high as a man, of stained snow heaped by the plow. In the far distance the wooded hills still showed as blue and brown, but the tints were weak, as in the prints of an etching taken to clean the plate.

  The weariness I felt overtakes me in the telling. I sat in the cab of the truck while, framed in the windshield like the blurred comics of an old silent movie, my father and Hummel shovelled out our Buick, which the plows in clearing Route 122 had buried up to the windows. I was bothered by an itching that had spread from my nose through my throat and that I felt to have some connection with the clammy chill of my shoes. The shoulder of the hill threw its shadow over us and a little wind ignited. The sunlight grew long, golden, and vanished from all but the tips of the trees. Expertly Hummel started the motor, backed the rear tires onto the chains, and made them fast with a plier-like tool. Little better than blurs now in the bluish twilight, the men enacted a pantomime with a wallet whose conclusion I did not comprehend. They both gestured widely and then hugged each other farewell. Hummel opened the door of the cab, cold air swept over me, and I transferred my brittle body to our hearse.

  As we drove home, the days since I had last seen this road sealed shut like a neat scar. Here was t
he crest of Coughdrop Hill, here was the curve and clay embankment where we had picked up the hitchhiker, here was the Clover Leaf Dairy where conveyor belts removed the cow dung and all the silver chimneys on the barn roof were smoking against the salmon flush of the sky; here was the straightaway where we had once killed a confused oriole, here was Galilee and, beside the site of the old Seven-Mile Inn, Potteiger’s Store, where we stopped for food. Item by item, as if he were a druggist filling a prescription, my father went around the shelves gathering bread and sliced peaches and Ritz crackers and Shredded Wheat, piling them up on the counter in front of Charlie Potteiger, who had been a farmer and had come back from the Pacific to sell his farm to developers and set up this store. He kept our debt in a little brown five-cent notebook and, though it ran as high as sixty dollars between paydays, never forgave us so much as an odd penny. “And a loop of that pork sausage my father-in-law loves so much and a half-pound of Lebanon baloney for the kid to nibble,” my father told him. An extravagance had entered his shopping, which was customarily niggardly, a day’s food at a time, as if the next day there might be fewer mouths to feed. He even bought a bunch of fresh bananas. As Potteiger with his pencil stub effortfully toted up the bill my father looked at me and asked, “Did you get a soft drink?”

  I usually did, as a last sip of civilization before we descended into that rural darkness that by some mistake had become our home. “No,” I told him. “I have no appetite. Let’s go.”

  “This poor son of mine,” my father announced loudly to the little pack of loafers in red hunting caps who even on this day of storm had showed up to stand around and chew in here, “he hasn’t been home for two nights and he wants to see his mamma.”

  Furious, I pushed through the door into the air. The lake across the road, rimmed in snow, looked black as the back of a mirror. It was that twilight in which some cars have turned on their headlights, some their parking lights, and some no lights at all. My father drove as fast as if the road were bare. In some parts the road had been scraped clean and on these patches our chains changed tune. Halfway up Fire Hill (above us, the church and its tiny cross were inked onto an indigo sky), a link snapped. It racketed against the rear right fender for the remaining mile. The few houses of Firetown patched the dusk with downstairs windows glowing dimly as embers. The Ten Mile Inn was dark and boarded shut.

  Our road had not been plowed. Our road was actually two roads, one which went in through the Amish fields and another which led off from that, down past our property, to rejoin the highway by Silas Schoelkopf’s pond and barn. We had left by this, the lower road; we returned by the upper. My father rammed the Buick through the heaped snow and it sagged to a stop perhaps ten feet off the highway. The motor stalled. He turned off the ignition and snapped off the lights. “How will we get out tomorrow?” I asked.

  “One thing at a time,” he said. “I want to get you home. Can you walk it?”

  “What else can I do?”

  The unplowed road showed as a long stretch of shimmering gray set in perspective by two scribbled lines of young trees. Not a houselight showed from here. Above us, in a sky still too bright a blue to support stars, sparse pale clouds like giant flakes of marble drifted westward so stilly their motion seemed lent by the earth’s revolution. The snow overwhelmed my ankles and inundated my shoes. I tried to walk in my father’s footsteps but his strides were too great. As the sound of traffic on the highway faded behind us, a powerful silence strengthened. There was a star before us, one, low in the sky and so brilliant its white light seemed warm.

  I asked my father, “What’s that star?”

  “Venus.”

  “Is it always the first to come out?”

  “No. Sometimes it’s the last to go. Sometimes when I get up the sun is coming up through the woods and Venus is still hanging over the Amishman’s hill.”

  “Can you steer by it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried. It’s an interesting question.” I told him, “I can never find the North Star. I always expect it to be bigger than it is.”

  “That’s right. I don’t know why the hell they made it so small.”

  His shape before me was made less human by the bag of groceries he was carrying and it seemed, my legs having ceased to convey the sensations of walking, that his was the shape of the neck and head of a horse I was riding. I looked straight up and the cobalt dome was swept clean of marble flakes and a few faint stars were wearing through. The branches of the young trees we walked between fell away to disclose the long low hump, sullenly lustrous, of our upper field.

  “Peter?”

  My father’s voice startled me, I felt so alone. “What?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you were still behind me.”

  “Well where else would I be?”

  “You got me there.”

  “Shall I carry the bag for a while?”

  “No, it’s clumsy but it’s not heavy.”

  “Why’d you buy all those bananas if you knew we were going to have to lug everything half a mile?”

  “Insanity,” he answered. “Hereditary insanity.” It was a favorite concept of his.

  Lady, hearing our voices, began to bark behind the field. The quick dim doublets of sound like butterflies winged toward us close to the earth, skimming the feathery crust rather than risking a plunge upward into the steep smooth dome that capped a space of Pennsylvania a hundred miles wide. From the spot where the lower road led off from the upper we could see on a clear day to the first blue beginnings of the Alleghenies. We walked downward into the shelter of our hillside. The trees of our orchard came first into view, then our barn, and through the crotches and tangled barren branches of the orchard our house. Our downstairs light was on, yet as we moved across the silent yard I became convinced that the light was an illusion, that the people inside had died and left the light burning. My father beside me moaned, “Jesus I know Pop’s tumbled down those damn stairs.”

  But footsteps had beaten a path around the corner of the house ahead of us, and on the porch there were plentiful signs that the pump had been used. Lady, free, raced out of the darkness with the whir of a growl in her throat and then, recognizing us, leaped like a fish from the splashing snow, jabbing her muzzle at our faces, her throat stuck fast on a weak agonized note of whimpering love. She battered and bustled through the double kitchen door with us and in the warm indoors released an unmistakable tang of skunk.

  Here was the kitchen, honey-colored, lit; here were the two clocks, the red electric thrown all out of right time by the power failure but running gamely nevertheless; here was my mother, coming forward with large arms and a happy girlish face to take the bundle from my father and welcome us home. “My heroes,” she said.

  My father explained, “I tried to call you this morning, Cassie, but the lines were down. Have you had a rough time? There’s an Italian sandwich in the bag.”

  “We’ve had a wonderful time,” my mother said. “Dad’s been sawing wood and this evening I made some of that dried-beef soup with apples Grammy used to make when we ran out of food.” An ambrosial smell of warm apples did breathe from the stove, and a fire was dancing in the fireplace.

  “Huh?” It seemed to daze my father that the world had gone on without him. “Pop’s O. K.? Where in hell is he?”

  Even as he spoke he walked into the other room and there, sitting in his accustomed place on the sofa, was my grandfather, his shapely hands folded across his chest, his little worn Bible, shut, balanced on one knee.

  “Did you cut some wood, Pop?” my father asked loudly. “You’re a walking miracle. At some point in your life you must have done something right.”

  “George, now I don’t wish to be ac-quisi-tive, but by any chance did you remember to bring the Sun?” The mailman of course hadn’t gotten through, a sore deprivation for my grandfather, who wouldn’t believe it had snowed until he read it in the newspaper.

  “Hell, no, Pop,” my father bellow
ed. “I forgot. I don’t know why, it was insanity.”

  My mother and the dog came into the living-room with us. Lady, unable to keep the good news of our return to herself any longer, jumped up on the sofa and with a snap of her body thrust her nose into my grandfather’s ear.

  “Hyar, yaar,” he said, and stood up, rescuing the Bible from his knee in the same motion.

  “Doc Appleton called,” my mother said to my father.

  “Huh? I thought the lines were out.”

  “They came on this afternoon, after the electricity. I called Hummel’s and Vera said you had gone. She sounded more pleasant to me than I’ve ever heard her over the phone.”

  “What did Appleton say?” my father asked, crossing the room and looking down at my globe of the Earth.