Roger's Version: A Novel

by John Updike

  “You shouldn’t take it out on Paula,” I told her.

  Her mood turned angry; her emotions lay next to one another in a kind of watery film shimmering with nervous current. “So that’s who this mercy call is all about. Little honey chile. Save your charity, Nunc, she can take care of herself. All the little bitch does all day is bug me. I sit out there in the playground for hours while she eats broken glass. But it never kills her, all that happens is her shit sparkles.” She laughed again, at her own joke. I let myself smile. She wiped her stubby, shiny nose. Without that nose, and if she had lost ten pounds, she might have been pretty. “On top of everything else, I’m getting a fucking cold. You wonder why everybody doesn’t commit suicide sometimes.”

  “One does wonder that,” I said, and sighed, and stood. I had become oblivious to the smells of the place, the vague mushed-peanut odor, the ammonia from the child’s saturated diapers. The room’s ambience enclosed me as loosely and lightly as Verna’s terrycloth robe enclosed her body. I was becoming too comfortable here. “Would a little loan help?” I asked.

  Her tears, her words had become all one snuffle. “No,” I heard her say, and then she shook her head to negate the word, and sobbed “Yes.” She felt obliged to explain, “Dumb AFDC hardly covers the rent, and the WIC is just food vouchers. I could use cash to buy a decent chair or something for when people come to visit. I mean, this stuff is junk.”

  I took two twenties from my wallet, and considered inflation, and pulled out another, and gave her the three bills. I could walk by the bank on the way home and replenish my cash at the automatic teller, the little computer whose screen always politely says THANK YOU and PLEASE WAIT WHILE YOUR TRANSACTION IS BEING PROCESSED. When she held out her hand, its smallish plump palm was creased with lines lavender in color, like the newborn infant she had described.

  Our transaction cooled us both off. Tucking the money into the pocket of her robe as she simultaneously removed a handkerchief, Verna sniffled one last time, wiped her coarse nose, and looked at me dry-eyed, with the defiant calm of a criminal. A wonderful moral plasticity seemed displayed before me, to go with her pliant pale flesh. “So now what?” she asked.

  “I’ll look into equivalency tests and night courses,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “just like you looked into getting Dale his grant.”

  I ignored this; it was time to reassert some dignity. “And I’d like to have you to my house to meet Esther and our son, Richie. Perhaps Thanksgiving would be a good time.”

  “Thanksgiving, Jeez-o, thanks,” she said, mocking.

  “Or, if you prefer, Verna, we could do nothing. I came here to investigate your attitude and now consider it investigated.”

  She hung her head. I could look down past her loose lapel at nearly the full curve of her young breast, its silken weight and faint blue veins. She was shorter than I, as was Esther. “Thanksgiving would be nice,” she said humbly.

  As we parted, I made an effort to see her not as a child but as a young woman, sturdy and to an extent competent, a biological success at least, and her life no more alarming than most of our animal lives as a hypothetical Mind might see them from above, their appetitive traffic apparently undirected but rarely producing a crash. “You were nice to come, Nunc,” she added, offering her plump dimpled cheek for a kiss.

  As I bestowed it (her skin had a startlingly fine texture, like flour when you dip your hand into it) I saw that little Paula had fallen silent on the floor because of an intense plucking interest in something discovered between the nubs of shag rug. Her lips were covered with fine purple threads. She looked up at me and droolingly smiled. I bent to caress her head and was startled and a touch repelled by her scalp’s warmth.

  Yet the secluded squalor of this unnumbered apartment pulled at me as I left. Its musty aroma searched out some deep Cleveland memory, perhaps the basement where my grandmother had laid up canned peaches on dusty shelves and where she did the week’s washing with a hand-turned wringer, amid an eye-stinging smell of lye. Verna’s place had for me what some theologians call inwardness. My own house, on its “nice” street with its equally pricey neighbors, felt sometimes as if the life Esther and Richie and I lived behind its large windows were altogether for display.

  Outside the much-thumbed blank green door, I paused long enough to hear Verna shriek at her daughter, “Will you stop eating those fucking fuzz balls!” Then came the sound of a slap, and of whimpers breathlessly mounting into unstanchable wounded cries.

  Hot times. I could not imagine what Edna had related; my only recollections of ever touching my half-sister were of wrestling in anger, over some toy or injustice. I vocally detested her and often protested to my mother my having to share a few weeks of summer with her. I called her, it came to me, Pieface; my mother enjoyed the malice of it, and the nickname was apt, as it would be for Edna’s daughter. Broad, flat faces, a touch doughy. As she and I grew older, our physical tussels ceased, as best as I could remember; and if my pubescent thoughts had sometimes turned to her, a thin partition away on those hot “corn-growing” nights in Chagrin Falls, thoughts are not deeds, not on this mortal plane. How odd of Edna to say that, or of Verna to say she did.

  Two limber black youths were mounting the steel stairs three at a time, in utterly silent bounds. They rose toward me at great speed, in their worn stovepipe jeans, their shiny basketball jackets and huge silent jogging shoes, and passed on either side of me like headlights that turn out to be motorcycles. My heart skipped and I nodded tersely, a second too late. In my tweed jacket and boyish gray haircut, I was the suspicious character here.

  Along Prospect Street, the shadows of the half-abandoned houses extended from curb to curb, although in the sky overhead racing white clouds and negative patches of stark blue still spoke of bright day. At the rear of a vacant lot stood a marvel I had not noticed when walking this way thirty minutes ago: a shapely tall ginkgo tree, each of its shuddering fanshaped leaves turned, with a uniformity unlike the ragged turning of the less primordial deciduous trees, a plangent yellow monotone. The tree seemed a towering outcry there in this derelict block, in a passing slash of sun. Along with a flicker of idle knowledge concerning the ginkgo—it had existed before the dinosaurs; in ancient China it had been grown around temples as a sacred tree; like the human species, it was dioecious, that is, divided into male and female; the female seed pods stink—came this stranger, certain knowledge that Dale, after his visit to Verna after seeing me a week ago, had also noticed this particular tree, and been struck by it, as by the green puddle, the black turd. His religious reaction passed into me. Peace descended, that wordless gratification which seems to partake of the fundamental cosmic condition. I even stopped, on the pavement of this unsavory neighborhood, to ponder more deeply that tall ginkgo with its gonglike golden color; there are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.

  II

  i

  The next time Dale came to see me in my office, sidling in with that embarrassed effrontery of his, his red knuckles and his acne the only imperfections in his generally waxen pallor, I felt fonder of him. Verna’s assurance that he was not her lover had something to do with my kindly disposition: these young people come at you with their drawn sword of youth and it turns out to be a rubber prop, a nerf sword. They are no better at extracting happiness from their animal health than we were. He was still wearing his navy-blue watch cap but, as the weather got colder, no longer a camouflage jacket—instead, a denim jacket with a sheepskin lining, its yellow-white tufts making a scruffy halo around its edges. A cowboy look, though he lacked the Marlboro.

  “I filled out my forms and turned them in and thought you might like to have a Xerox.”

  “I would.” My eye dropped past his statistics to his description of his project. To demonstrate from existing physical and biological data, through the use of models and manipulations on the electronic di
gital computer, the existence of God, i.e., of a purposive and determining intelligence behind all phenomena. “Biological?” I merely asked.

  Dale slumped into the chair of many woods facing my desk and told me, “I’ve been looking a little into evolution and Darwinism and all that; I hadn’t much thought about any of it since high school. You know, they show you these charts with the blue-green algae on the bottom and primates branching off from the tree shrew and you assume it’s just as much fact as the map of the Mississippi. But in fact they don’t know anything, or hardly anything. It’s dogma. They just draw these lines between fossils that have nothing to do with one another and call it evolution. There are hardly any links. There isn’t any gradualism, and Darwin’s whole idea of how change comes about was of course by gradual increments, each tiny advantage consolidated by natural selection.”

  “Dogma,” I said, shifting in my own chair uncomfortably. The Admissions Committee, which once had but to sift lightly through ministerial candidates from the genteel, mainly Unitarian families of New England, now must yield to the applications of untamed creationists from Nebraska and Tennessee; an unattractive lot they tend to be, with a curious physical propensity for wall eyes and jug ears and, among the females, enormous breasts, which they carry through our halls like a penitential burden slung about their necks, suggesting those unfortunates in Dante’s fourth circle “rolling dead weights with full chest pushing square” (“voltando pesi per forza di poppa” [Canto VII, line 27] as translated by Laurence Binyon).

  “Yeah,” Dale said. “Right at the beginning, all this easy talk about a ‘primordial soup,’ where you have flashes of lightning brewing up amino acids and then proteins and finally a self-replicating string of DNA inside some kind of bubble that was the first cell, or creature—it sounds great but just doesn’t work, it’s on a par with flies and spiders being spontaneously generated out of dung or haystacks or whatever it was the people in the Middle Ages thought happened. For one thing, the theory is based on the primitive Earth’s atmosphere being a reducing one, that is, based on nitrogen and hydrogen and short of free oxygen. But if you look at the earliest rocks, they’re full of rust, so there was oxygen. Also, the amount of information you need to make even the simplest viruslike piece of life is so great that the odds of its being assembled by chance are off the map. One biologist puts them at ten to the three hundred and oneth; another guy assumed there were ten to the twentieth planets in the universe capable of supporting life and he still came up with odds of ten to the four hundred fifteenth to one against its arising anyplace but here. Wickramasinghe, who I mentioned the last time, says the odds are ten to the forty thousandth, which is pages and pages of zeros; but that’s just rubbing it in.”

  “We don’t want to do that,” I said, shifting my position again; he was the pea and I was the princess. I told him, “You keep citing these long odds to me as if the atoms and molecules had to fall into these combinations by purely mathematical chance; but suppose at this microscopic level there is some principle of cohesion or organization, comparable, say, to the instinct of self-preservation at the level of the individual organism, or gravity at the cosmic level, that would tend to encourage assembly and complexity. Then these long odds would go way down, without any supernatural intervention.”

  “That’s not bad, sir, for a non-scientist; but your asking for another molecular law is asking for a bigger deal than you probably know. Also, there’re all kinds of additional problems the ‘primordial-soup’ boys just plain ignore. The energy problem, for example: for that first little microscopic Adam to survive he’d need some energy system to keep him going, and right there you’re in a whole other engineering realm. Enzymes, is another. You can’t make proteins without DNA, but you can’t make DNA without enzymes, and enzymes are proteins. How do you do it? They’ve been mixing up these electrified soups in the laboratory since 1954, and they haven’t come up with anything like life yet. Why not? If they can’t do it with all their controls, how come blind Nature did?”

  “Nature,” I pointed out, “had aeons of time, and oceans of material.”

  “That’s what I used to think, too,” the young man said, with that irritating, confiding aplomb of his. “But if you look at the figures, it doesn’t check out. We have the purposive intelligence we say Nature doesn’t, and if it was do-able on our terms we should have done it by now. What happens is pathetic, a mess of unrelated polymers. Soup produces soup. Garbage in, garbage out, as we say in the computer business. Out in California, they’re trying to get nucleotides to self-assemble, and O.K., they do, but so slowly it just goes to show: one unit is added every quarter of an hour, as against a fraction of a second in nature.”

  “Well, but even that’s indicative, isn’t it, that we’re dealing with a natural and not a supernatural process?” I studied my thumbnail. I had filed away the annoying small notch I had noticed before and now this nail was minutely, almost microscopically shorter than the other, with not quite enough white edge, as though I were a bit of a nail-biter. Verna’s nails had been childishly short, I seemed to recall; whereas Esther’s were too long. Fingernails: they tell time. In less than an hour I would be tackling my heresy seminar, the first of two full sessions spent on the Pelagians. Again and again (I would mischievously begin, to warm up the class) one is compelled to notice how much pleasanter, more reasonable and agreeable, the heretics in hindsight appear than those enforcers who opposed them on behalf of what became Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Who wouldn’t prefer, for example, plump Pelagius (a “corpulent dog,” fumed Jerome, “weighed down with Scottish porridge”) and his amiable emissary Celestius and his silver-tongued apologist Julian, with their harmless hope that Man could do some good, could do something on his own to activate redeeming grace—who wouldn’t prefer such humanists to irascible Jerome and to romantic Augustine, with his hysterical insistence on the evil of concupiscence (his own at last sated) and the damnability of freshly born babies? Once a Manichee, always a Manichee, Julian had shrewdly pointed out, apropos of our Algerian friend the bishop of Hippo.

  The boy was refuting me while my absent mind rehearsed my lecture. “You sound just like the hard-core neo-Darwinists,” Dale said. “They talk grandly about trends, and tendencies, and the inevitable imperfections of the fossil records. Imperfections! There’s almost nothing there, just sheets of creatures that appear and disappear. The so-called gaps aren’t gaps, they’re humongous huge holes.”

  Where had I heard that word before, recently?

  “Where are the pre-Cambrian fossils?” Dale asked. “Suddenly, multi-celled animals are everywhere, and seven phyla exist, and about five hundred species—arthropods, brachiopods, sponges, worms. Almost everything, in fact, except what you’d expect—protozoans. How did cells learn to congregate? For that matter, how did the prokaryotic cell, which is what the blue-green algae were, develop into our own eukaryotic cell, which has not only a nucleus but mitochondria, the nucleolus, the Golgi apparatus, and stuff they haven’t even figured out what it does yet. The two kinds of cell are as different as a cottage and a cathedral—what happened?”

  “Well,” I told Dale, “something did, and I’m not sure I can myself see the hand of God in it. All this arguing backwards you do, from present conditions, saying they’re so highly improbable—how much further does it get us than the cave man, who didn’t understand why the moon changed shape in the sky every month and so made up various stories about what tricks and antics the gods were up to up there? You seem to think that God obligingly is going to rush into any vacuum, any gap of knowledge. The modern scientist doesn’t claim to know everything, he just claims to know more than his predecessors did, and that naturalist explanations seem to work. You can’t have all the benefit of modern science and keep the cave man’s cosmology, too. You’re tying God to human ignorance; in my opinion, Mr. Kohler, He’s been tied to that too long.”

  I had made him sit up, his pale-blue eyes open wide. “Is that what I’m doing?�
� he asked. “Tying God to ignorance?”

  I spread my hand with its still-imperfect thumbnail flat on my desk. “It is. I say, Free Him!” So Dale too had hit home; he had aroused passion in me. I cared about this. Free Him, even though He die.

  Dale settled back, a smug or uncertain small smile on his lips, the fleece lining his jacket flaring behind his neck. “All I think I’m doing, Professor Lambert, is this: modern man has been persuaded he’s surrounded by an airtight atheist explanation of natural reality. What I’m saying is, Hey, wait a minute, there’s more going on here than they’re letting you know. These astronomers, these biologists are staring something in the face they’re not letting you in on, because they don’t want to believe it themselves. But there it is. You can take or leave it, because that’s the freedom God gave us, but intellectually don’t be intimidated. Intellectually you don’t owe the Devil a thing.”

  “Oh. You see the Devil at work.”

  “I do. Everywhere. All the time.”

  “And who is he, do you think?”

  “The Devil is doubt. He’s what makes us reject the gifts God gives us, he makes us spurn the life we’ve been given. Did you know, suicide is the second cause of death among teen-agers, second only to automobile accidents, which are often a kind of suicide also?”

  “Funny,” I said. “I would have said, looking at recent history and, for that matter, at some of our present-day ayatollahs and Führers, the opposite. The Devil is the absence of doubt. He’s what pushes people into suicide bombing, into setting up extermination camps. Doubt may give your dinner a funny taste, but it’s faith that goes out and kills.”