by John Updike
We were making of her, I noticed, a distant object of reverence, of wary speculation. This nineteen-year-old truant from Cleveland, with not a thing in her head but what pop music put there. I took a plunge. “One avuncular gesture I thought of making,” I said, “was to have my wife invite her to have Thanksgiving with us and our son. We’d be happy to have you, too, if you have no other commitments.” I rather assumed he did: a communal dinner, perhaps, at long tables in a big church basement, with a babbling, colorful host of dogooding born-agains and demented street people.
His uncanny eyes widened. “That would be real nice,” he said. “I was going to just eat in a cafeteria, they put on these turkey specials that are really pretty good, and I like the no-fuss atmosphere. Frankly, sir, holidays tend to freak me out. But that would be terrific, to meet your missus and your boy.” Away from the urgencies of scientific explanation, his speech lapsed into a Midwestern folksiness.
And he was certainly less organized-religion-oriented than I thought proper for one of his fervor. Thanksgiving in a cafeteria? Christmas in a brothel? Of course, the Church has always been recharged unorthodoxly. Augustine was a pagan, then a Manichee. Tertullian was a lawyer. Pelagius himself had no ecclesiastical status, and may have first come to Rome as a law student. If the salt lose its savor, wherewith indeed? Jesus Himself, John the Baptist: raggedy outsiders. Insiders tend to be villains. Like me, I would smilingly tell my incredulous, admiring students.
ii
Dale Kohler’s distaste for holidays formed yet another secret bond between us; in my childhood, bumpy monoxious car rides out into the rural Ohio flatness, along what was too aptly named Kinsman Pike, were my prime association with American Christendom’s tribal feasts. My deserted, husbandless, pitiable mother and I would visit her “people,” the men horsefaced and leathery and placidly sexless but the women wide sloping mounds of fat trembling on the edge, it seemed to me, of indecency, with their self-conscious shrieks of laughter, their hands at each shriek darting to cover their mouths, their little teeth decayed and crooked, and the steaming food they were copiously setting on the table a malodorous double-entendre, something that excited them, served up in an atmosphere heavy with barnyard innuendo as well as lugubrious piety.
In my great-aunt Wilma’s house a praying Jesus, its colors sick and slippery, hung in the kitchen, against deeply yellowed wallpaper, behind the black stovepipe too hot to touch, and in the parlor the only book, with a little knobby table all to itself, was the family Bible; its spine had ridges as of cartilage beneath its terrible hide, creased like the skin of a slaughtered animal, with that same soft stink of the tannery, and a faded lavender bookmark, like a wide, forked tongue, protruded from its gold-edged pages. There was a smell of coal oil and, tracked in on the men’s shoes, a musty scent of mash, of livestock feed. These country outings depressed me for days on either side, in anticipation and in memory; and during the actual event my depression was such that I seemed to sink beneath the table, so that my visual memories focus on the embroidered tablecloth fringe and the knees and fat ankles and creased shoes hidden and shuffling in the strange dim cave beyond. When very young, I may actually have crawled in there, among the shoes and knees.
On the Fourth of July, the dismal holiday tableau was repeated, in a temperature ninety degrees higher, and sometimes outdoors, on rough tables set up beneath the back-yard tulip poplars, pyramids of corn-on-the-cob shining with butter and platters of pork chops arriving charred from the grill amid cries such as might have greeted a Turkish belly dancer or the crucified Messiah.
The opaque, shy, menacing silence of the farm animals they tended had rubbed off on my country cousins, and like these beasts they tended to bump against things, as a way of perception. Dressed in sun-faded cotton, they bumped against me, and I feebly fought back, or hid, or else on rare occasions was lulled into a desultory game of quoits or a futile visit to some watercress-choked rivulet with a pole and hook and pinkish earthworms, to whose torments, impaled, my bumpkin playmates were placidly blind. The fish never bit. The afternoon, as the grown-ups grew more and more hilarious beneath the tulip poplars, never ended, but tailed into the blanched summer evening and at last the darkness of the Pike, my fragile, wounded mother at our old Buick’s wheel, complaining of a headache and night blindness.
Edna was never along on these excursions, being safe with my disgraced father and wicked stepmother in suburban Chagrin Falls, where her tennis and golf lessons would be in full swing at “the club”: here, in a palatial spread of mock-Tudor buildings and fenced-in courts at the end of a long curving driveway, there was a swimming pool where crew-cut boys executed splashy cannonballs in tribute to Edna’s budding figure, and where she and her guests, of whom I was for my month of exile one, miraculously obtained endless Cokes and hot dogs from a poolside commissary simply by reciting a number, our father’s chit code. Little as I liked Edna, who as pubescence took hold had added girlish vanity and a bubbly snobbism to her faults, these country relatives made me think fondly of her. The humid oppression of blood, of ancestry, of tedious tradition and the mummified past, that rural past when the stupid, sluggish, malingering earth spirits needed periodic human cavorting to remind them to switch on the next season—this was what holidays meant to me.
With a second wife, as my father had discovered before me, one’s social obligations lighten. Esther and I at first, in the flush of my liberation from all the conformities expected of ministers, ignored Thanksgiving entirely, and even did without a Christmas tree, acknowledging our Saviour’s (according only to Matthew) star-crossed birth with a pale supper of sole and champagne the night before, and a cursory exchange of presents at breakfast. My first wife, Lillian, herself a minister’s daughter, had been a great proponent of the groaning board, of the rising at dawn to stuff the stuffed turkey into the grim oven, and of chaotically extended hospitality. These social ordeals soothed and flattered that within her which was mortally insulted by her biological inability—a ghostly cross we had carried in common until my sperm, produced by masturbation behind a swaying curtain into the clammy plastic substitute for a vagina the hospital had provided (it had also provided copies of Penthouse to stimulate the feat, and several tattered Bee-Line paperbacks: I read on and on, even into limpness, in a minor classic called Hot Pants Schoolmarm), was microscopically exonerated. Wandering students, bereft parishioners, distant cousins—we entertained them all, in a suffocating charade of fecundity. The Thanksgiving turkey, the Christmas goose, the Easter leg of lamb, the Labor Day rump roast—carving was giving me tennis elbow. Poor tall docile barren Lillian. Only briefly heartbroken by my defection, she took a secretarial degree after our divorce and disappeared into a corporation headquarters above White Plains, one of those with artificial lakes and abstract aluminum fountains and terraced parking lots; and then she married, most startlingly, money, a corpulent man with a half-ton of children by previous couplings. He adoringly takes her to Florida for four months of the year, like a New-World Persephone.
As Richie matured to the point of comparing notes with his peers, Esther and I have had to reconstitute some holiday observances. The house, in fact, with its baronial panelling and tile-faced fireplaces and high-ceilinged rooms, cries out for parties. When we do give one, usually in late May to celebrate the end of school, it seems, to my possibly too-delicate sense of it, underattended; I cannot escape my suspicion that the Kriegmans in their way and the Ellicotts in theirs are more adequate to this neighborhood than we, Esther and I, whose instincts tend toward a bohemian austerity—the book-choked foyer, the attic smelling of oil paints. Having scandalized a parish fourteen years ago, we still are, perhaps, shy. But for today I had laid and lit a fire in the living room, and its crackling dance ignited red echoes at the prismatic corners of our glass table and in the curved panes of our big bow window. Though it was cold outside, with a film of snow on the dead lawn and brick walk, the house smelled warmly of wood burning and food cooking, and Richie had been
lured away from the parades and football games on television by the mystery of our guests.
They came separately, which weakened their liaison in my mind and pleased me. First, Dale appeared at the door, incongruous in a gray suit and button-down shirt; only his necktie, purple violently interrupted by green, struck the gauche note we expect from scientists. He carried a small paper cone of zinnias, the sort of bouquet young drug addicts sell now from traffic islands, and presented it to Esther, who had hurried down the hall in her apron. “How nice!” she exclaimed.
“You’re nice to have me, Mrs. Lambert,” he said. There was a smoothness to this boy I kept forgetting. Also, his easy tallness, which in the slant chapel light of my office he quickly folded into the university chair opposite my desk, here in my front hall loomed, all suited and combed, as a costume of grace, a form of potency. He was hatless. Because his curly, thinning brown hair had been combed back dark with water, his forehead was exposed and looked strikingly white, of the same unnatural candor as his eyes.
“Oh no,” Esther said, slightly flustered, as women holding flowers do seem, “it’s fun for us; Rog has talked about you quite a lot, you’ve made a big impression on him.” She was wearing a frilly apron over a tight-necked dress of green velvet.
“Big, but mostly negative, I think,” he said, giving her a smile I had never seen in my office, where his mouth was nervous and, in its eagerness to convert me, predatory, saliva sometimes bubbling in the corners. His smile at Esther didn’t stretch his lips, but lightly shaped and parted them, as if in poised wait for her next move. I saw her through his eyes, my little wife, her tense and tidy figure foreshortened even more from his angle than from mine. Her gingery red hair and its prim do had been loosened and fluffed by the work and heat of cooking; her bulging eyes were very green in the light from the front door. Esther had put on a glint, an alertness, an older woman’s assured and ironic potential playfulness.
“Not at all,” I intervened. “In fact, I was talking to Closson just the other day about your grant, and he thought it might bring in some amusing publicity, if it were known the school was underwriting computer theology.”
Dale looked uncomfortable. “I don’t see as how publicity would really help.”
“Rog is saying,” Esther told him, “that the school thinks it might help them. I’ll go put your lovely flowers in water.” She hurried off, clicking; her hips tugged the iridescent velvet of her green Thanksgiving dress rapidly this way and that, light scribbling zigzags on the folds.
I joked to Dale, anent publicity, “ ‘Preach the gospel to every creature.’ ”
“ ‘When thou prayest,’ ” he quoted back at me, “ ‘enter into thy closet.’ ”
He wore no topcoat, so there was none for me to take. I led him into the living room. “Hi,” Richie said, guiltily rising up from beside the fire; he had plugged in the little Sony and had been watching tiny red men struggle against others in blue.
“Hi there. Happy Thanksgiving. Who’s ahead, the Pats or Dallas?”
“The Pats stink.”
“Not always. Eason’s had some great days this season.”
Again, I was surprised by the young man’s savoir-faire, his quickness to make human connections, and I felt an unaccountable pang of jealousy: as if I wanted him, after our wordy wrestles on the floor of Creation, to be mine alone. He was promiscuous, in his untroubled conviction of his own righteousness, and this was another reason he should be destroyed. I offered to get him a drink, pointing out that I was having a glass of white wine. “Or a Bloody Mary? Some bourbon or Scotch?” He refused, instantly, softly, as one who habitually refuses, and asked me if I had any cranberry juice. I said I would see, and indeed there was, surprisingly, a half-bottle of this dreary liquid in the refrigerator. Cranberry juice depresses me, reminding me of bogs, of health food, of children with stained upper lips, and of old ladies gathering in dusty parlors to pool the titillations of their dwindling days. It looks dyed. When I returned with a glass of it, Dale and Richie were deep in conversation at the glass coffee table. Pencil and paper had been located, and Dale was saying, “A computer doesn’t figure the way we do. Show me how you do a square root. Take the square root of, oh, say, fifty-two.”
While the child was bending into the problem and slowly writing, Dale looked up at me and said, “This is a lovely home you have.”
“You were impressed by the Divinity School, too, as I recall.”
“Maybe I’m easily impressed.”
“You seem to find me,” I clarified for him, “always in posh surroundings.”
“I’m sure you’ve earned them,” he told me without smiling, and spoke to the boy seated beside him, on the red silk settee that was not quite close enough to the glass table for comfortable computation. “Hasn’t he, Richie? Your father? Worked hard.”
“All he ever does is read books nobody else ever does.”
I was trying to recall all of the quotation Dale had thrown at me. It occurs in the passage in Matthew about hypocrites praying aloud. Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret. Thy Father, which is in secret, blessed by Thy name.
“How’s the square root of fifty-two coming?” Dale asked Richie. I wondered how he had struck upon my age, for his number.
“I hate doing square roots. I get seven point two and then something little.”
“Let’s say seven point two one. O.K. Here’s how a computer would do it. It makes a guess, then plugs that guess into a formula that’s been programmed in, and gets a new number that then it plugs into the same formula, and keeps running it over and over until it gets the answer to within however many decimal places have been specified ahead of time. Here’s the formula.”
He wrote something on the piece of paper I did not bother to look at; I was glancing out the bow window to see if our other guest was arriving. Esther had talked to Verna on the phone and reported that the girl sounded bewildered and sullen and hadn’t been sure she could get a babysitter on Thanksgiving. But she’d call if she couldn’t, and she hadn’t.
“Let capital N be the number, fifty-two in this case, you want to find the square root of, and y subscript one, y subscript two, three, four, et cetera, be the successive approximations of its root. Now you can see here that at any stage y is not going to equal N divided by y except in one case. What is that?”
My poor child thought; I could feel his brain’s soft wheels turn, and turn, and not catch on anything. “I don’t know,” he confessed at last.
“Obviously,” Dale said, “if y has become the true root. Otherwise, there’s a difference, a discrepancy, between y and N divided by y. But if you take the average of the two numbers—by that I mean if you add them and divide by two—you’ll be a little closer to the answer, won’t you? You have to be. Can you see that?”
“Y-yes. I guess I can.” Light dawned, or pretended to. “I can!” the boy exclaimed, enthusiasm or its pretense causing his voice touchingly to crack. At times he reminded me of my mother, Alma, who often seemed to my childish sense of it to be trying to catch up, to recover the drift of a world that had moved and was still moving too fast for her.
“Great,” Dale said. “So we call that new y ‘y subscript two,’ and substitute it for the old y in the formula, and keep going until we start getting the same answer—like I say, to a certain number of places. Then that’s the answer, and the computer flashes it on the screen, in lots less than a second. But it’s had to do dozens and dozens of little tiny operations, all in binary numbers. You know about binary numbers, don’t you?”
“Kind of.”
“What are they teaching you at school, Richie? Where do you go to school?”
“Pilgrim Day” was the embarrassed answer.
“Very posh,” I announced from above them. “Very conservative. I think they still use Roman numerals.” The view from the bay window, whose window seat Esther had long ago padded with cushions covered in a fabric whose
Chinese panorama the sun had now faded to the dimmest of pagoda roofs and identically benign white faces, contained my brick walk, the shaggy back of our hedge, some supermarket sale fliers frozen into the snow-dusted lawn, a brown Milky Way wrapper, a curbside honey locust, and, across the street, the shuttered house of a former professor of Aramaic’s corpulent and paranoid widow, but still no little Verna trudging along; her stubborn plump face would be muffled against the cold, and her lashless eyes watery, red-rimmed slits.
“To finish up on this, Richie. You got the answer seven point two one. Let’s be real crazy and substitute ten as our guess for the square root into our formula, even though you can see at a glance the answer’s going to be seven and a little something, because why—?”
“Because,” Richie said, after a pause. I was sweating for him now, my child on the spot. Ever so tentatively he offered, “Because the square root of forty-nine is seven?”
“Riiiight.” Dale as big brother, as cozy “Y” counsellor, had the authentic blanketing concern, that made my skin crawl. “So if you put ten in, the new y equals one-half of ten plus—what’s fifty-two divided by ten, come on, it’s easy.”
“Five point two?”
“Exaaactly.” Coaxing, coaxing. The teacher’s whoredom, teasing up the mental erection. “So that’s one-half of fifteen point two or seven point six, see, already we’re drawing closer to the correct answer, which we know to be—?”
“I forget.”
“How could you forget? You just figured it out the hard way.”
“Seven point two?”
“Absolutely. O.K. So the next time around, the new y is going to equal seven point six plus fifty-two divided by seven point six, which is going to give us, oh, six point eight, let’s say, so that the sum divided by two is going to give us—what?”
“Uh … seven point two?”
“Which is—?” He couldn’t wait for the boy to fill in the gap. “—the answer, within one decimal place! Isn’t that beautiful?”