Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  “Fine, Mr. August, fine,” Freddie said, bobbing his head and smiling and not missing a note.

  “That’s Quin’s song,” my father said to me as we wriggled our way into a slippery curved seat at a round table.

  I didn’t say anything, but Uncle Quin, overhearing some disapproval in my silence, said, “Freddie’s a first-rate man. He has a boy going to Colgate this autumn.”

  I asked, “Is that really your song?”

  Uncle Quin grinned and put his warm broad hand on my shoulder; I hated, at that age, being touched. “I let them think it is,” he said, oddly purring. “To me, songs are like young girls. They’re all pretty.”

  A waiter in a red coat scurried up. “Mr. August! Back from the West? How are you, Mr. August?”

  “Getting by, Jerome, getting by. Jerome, I’d like you to meet my kid brother, Martin.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Martin. Are you paying New York a visit? Or do you live here?”

  My father quickly shook hands with Jerome, somewhat to Jerome’s surprise. “I’m just up for the afternoon, thank you. I live in a hick town in Pennsylvania you never heard of.”

  “I see, sir. A quick visit.”

  “This is the first time in six years that I’ve had a chance to see my brother.”

  “Yes, we’ve seen very little of him these past years. He’s a man we can never see too much of, isn’t that right?”

  Uncle Quin interrupted. “This is my nephew Jay.”

  “How do you like the big city, Jay?”

  “Fine.” I didn’t duplicate my father’s mistake of offering to shake hands.

  “Why, Jerome,” Uncle Quin said, “my brother and I would like to have a Scotch-on-the-rocks. The boy would like a ginger ale.”

  “No, wait,” I said. “What kinds of ice cream do you have?”

  “Vanilla and chocolate, sir.”

  I hesitated. I could scarcely believe it, when the cheap drugstore at home had fifteen flavors.

  “I’m afraid it’s not a very big selection,” Jerome said.

  “I guess vanilla.”

  “Yes, sir. One plate of vanilla.”

  When my ice cream came it was a golf ball in a flat silver dish; it kept spinning away as I dug at it with my spoon. Uncle Quin watched me and asked, “Is there anything especially Jay would like to do?”

  “The kid’d like to get into a bookstore,” my father said.

  “A bookstore. What sort of book, Jay?”

  I said, “I’d like to look for a good book of Vermeer.”

  “Vermeer,” Uncle Quin pronounced slowly, relishing the r’s, pretending to give the matter thought. “Dutch school.”

  “He’s Dutch, yes.”

  “For my own money, Jay, the French are the people to beat. We have four Degas ballet dancers in our living room in Chicago, and I could sit and look at one of them for hours. I think it’s wonderful, the feeling for balance the man had.”

  “Yeah, but don’t Degas’s paintings always remind you of colored drawings? For actually looking at things in terms of paint, for the lucid eye, I think Vermeer makes Degas look sick.”

  Uncle Quin said nothing, and my father, after an anxious glance across the table, said, “That’s the way he and his mother talk all the time. It’s all beyond me. I can’t understand a thing they say.”

  “Your mother is encouraging you to be a painter, is she, Jay?” Uncle Quin’s smile was very wide, and his cheeks were pushed out as if each held a candy.

  “Sure, I suppose she is.”

  “Your mother is a very wonderful woman, Jay,” Uncle Quin said.

  It was such an embarrassing remark, and so much depended upon your definition of “wonderful,” that I dug at my ice cream, and my father asked Uncle Quin about his own wife, Edna. When we left, Uncle Quin signed the check with his name and the name of some company. It was close to five o’clock.

  My uncle didn’t know much about the location of bookstores in New York—his last twenty years had been spent in Chicago—but he thought that if we went to Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue we should find something. The cab driver let us out beside a park that acted as kind of a back yard for the Public Library. It looked so inviting, so agreeably dusty, with the pigeons and the men nodding on the benches and the office girls in their taut summer dresses, that, without thinking, I led the two men into it. Shimmering buildings arrowed upward and glinted through the treetops. This was New York, I told myself: the silver town. Towers of ambition rose, crystalline, within me. “If you stand here,” my father said, “you can see the Empire State.” I went and stood beneath my father’s arm and followed with my eyes the direction of it. Something sharp and hard fell into my right eye. I ducked my head and blinked; it was painful.

  “What’s the trouble?” Uncle Quin’s voice asked.

  My father said, “The poor kid’s got something into his eye. He has the worst luck that way of anybody I ever knew.”

  The thing seemed to have life. It bit. “Ow,” I said, angry enough to cry.

  “If we can get him out of the wind,” my father’s voice said, “maybe I can see it.”

  “No, now, Marty, use your head. Never fool with the eyes or ears. The hotel is within two blocks. Can you walk two blocks, Jay?”

  “I’m blind, not lame,” I snapped.

  “He has a ready wit,” Uncle Quin said.

  Between the two men, shielding my eye with a hand, I walked to the hotel. From time to time, one of them would take my other hand, or put one of theirs on my shoulder, but I would walk faster, and the hands would drop away. I hoped our entrance into the hotel lobby would not be too conspicuous; I took my hand from my eye and walked erect, defying the impulse to stoop. Except for the one lid being shut and possibly my face being red, I imagined I looked passably suave. However, my guardians lost no time betraying me. Not only did they walk at my heels, as if I might topple any instant, but my father told one old bum sitting in the lobby, “Poor kid got something in his eye,” and Uncle Quin, passing the desk, called, “Send up a doctor to Twenty-eleven.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Quin,” my father said in the elevator. “I can get it out, now that he’s out of the wind. This is happening all the time. The kid’s eyes are too far front in his head.”

  “Never fool with the eyes, Martin. They are your most precious tool in life.”

  “It’ll work out,” I said, though I didn’t believe it would. It felt like a steel chip, deeply embedded.

  Up in the room, Uncle Quin made me lie down on the bed. My father, a handkerchief wadded in his hand so that one corner stuck out, approached me, but it hurt so much to open the eye that I repulsed him. “Don’t torment me,” I said, twisting my face away. “What good does it do? The doctor’ll be up.”

  Regretfully my father put the handkerchief back into his pocket.

  The doctor was a soft-handed man with little to say to anybody; he wasn’t pretending to be the family doctor. He rolled my lower eyelid on a thin stick, jabbed with a Q-tip, and showed me, on the end of the Q-tip, an eyelash. My own eyelash. He dropped three drops of yellow fluid into the eye to remove any chance of infection. The fluid stung, and I shut my eyes, leaning back into the pillow, glad it was over. When I opened them, my father was passing a bill into the doctor’s hand. The doctor thanked him, winked at me, and left. Uncle Quin came out of the bathroom.

  “Well, young man, how are you feeling now?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “It was just an eyelash,” my father said.

  “Just an eyelash! Well, I know how an eyelash can feel like a razor blade in there. But, now that the young invalid is recovered, we can think of dinner.”

  “No, I really appreciate your kindness, Quin, but we must be getting back to the sticks. I have an eight-o’clock meeting I should be at.”

  “I’m extremely sorry to hear that. What sort of meeting, Marty?”

  “A church council.”

  “So you’re still doing chur
ch work. Well, God bless you for it.”

  “Grace wanted me to ask you if you couldn’t possibly come over some day. We’ll put you up overnight. It would be a real treat for her to see you again.”

  Uncle Quin reached up and put his arm around his younger brother’s shoulders. “Martin, I’d like that better than anything in the world. But I am solid with appointments, and I must head west this Thursday. They don’t let me have a minute’s repose. Nothing would please my heart better than to share a quiet day with you and Grace in your home. Please give her my love, and tell her what a wonderful boy she is raising. The two of you are raising.”

  My father promised, “I’ll do that.” And, after a little more fuss, we left.

  “The child better?” the old man in the lobby called to us on the way out.

  “It was just an eyelash, thank you, sir,” my father said. When we got outside, I wondered if there were any bookstores still open.

  “We have no money.” “None at all?”

  “The doctor charged five dollars. That’s how much it costs in New York to get something in your eye.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. Do you think I pulled out the eyelash and stuck it in there myself? I didn’t tell you to call the doctor.”

  “I know that.”

  “Couldn’t we just go into a bookstore and look a minute?”

  “We haven’t time, Jay.”

  But when we reached Pennsylvania Station, it was over thirty minutes until the next train left. As we sat on a bench, my father smiled reminiscently. “Boy, he’s smart, isn’t he? His thinking is sixty light-years ahead of mine.”

  “Who? Whose thinking?”

  “My brother. Notice the way he hid in the bathroom until the doctor was gone? That’s how to make money. The rich man collects dollar bills like the stamp collector collects stamps. I knew he’d do it. I knew it when he told the clerk to send up a doctor that I’d have to pay for it.”

  “Well, why should he pay for it? You were the person to pay for it.”

  “That’s right. Why should he?” My father settled back, his eyes forward, his hands crossed and limp in his lap. The skin beneath his chin was loose; his temples seemed concave. The liquor was probably disagreeing with him. “That’s why he’s where he is now, and that’s why I am where I am.”

  The seed of my anger was a desire to recall him to himself, to scold him out of being old and tired. “Well, why’d you bring along only five dollars? You might have known something would happen.”

  “You’re right, Jay. I should have brought more.”

  “Look. Right over there is an open bookstore. Now if you had brought ten dollars—”

  “Is it open? I don’t think so. They just left the lights in the window on.”

  “What if it isn’t? What does it matter to us? Anyway, what kind of art book can you get for five dollars? Color plates cost money. How much do you think a decent book of Vermeer costs? It’d be cheap at fifteen dollars, even second-hand, with the pages all crummy and full of spilled coffee.” I kept on, shrilly flailing the passive and infuriating figure of my father, until we left the city. Once we were on the homeward train, my tantrum ended; it had been a kind of ritual, for both of us, and he had endured my screams complacently, nodding assent, like a midwife assisting at the birth of family pride. Years passed before I needed to go to New York again.

  MY UNCLE’S DEATH

  HE DIED while shaving; when I was told of this, I pictured him staggering back heavily, stricken, his own amazed face in the mirror the last thing he ever saw. His face flashed there for him, hung there, slipped backward; and then the mirror was full of the blank bathroom wall. I pictured this so sharply I seemed to have been there.

  At his funeral I felt, for the first time, my adult height. The Manatees are not a family of breeders, and the number of relatives was small; walking up the aisle to the front pew with my parents, my aunt and my two cousins, I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught, from the faces of those still seated, an odd, motionless, intent look, almost an odor, of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief. The look, no doubt, was primarily directed at my aunt, the widow, who, on the arm of my father, led our ragged, rustling procession. But we all—all the relatives—shared in it and were for the moment heroes of bereavement: a surviving band, a clan. I carried my role proudly, though doubting that I had felt enough sorrow to earn it. I was just sixteen, still an inch or two short of my eventual height, but walking down that aisle I entered, through that strange odor of respect, pity, and wonder, the company of adulthood. I became a Manatee. Unfairly enough, my two cousins, my uncle’s daughters, were a little younger than I and emerged from the church, with all their bewildering weight of loss, still children, though fatherless.

  Yet I had loved my uncle, as much as the distance between us permitted. He was famous and rich. Not so famous and rich, I have since discovered, as our branch of the family imagined, but enough for a head shot and a half column on the obituary page of The New York Times. Trained as an architect—though he never got his degree—he speculated in real estate, and there are several blocks of Manhattan that would not look quite the same if he had never lived. The phantom presence of his importance hovered about our family table long before I first saw him seated there as a guest, and when I try to remember him as he was, his fame and wealth, which I so obtrusively wanted for myself, inflate and blur his face, making it unreally large and distant—a clown-faced moon hung in the skimpy branches of my family tree.

  I cannot reach him. I can remember nothing about him that is quite real except his death; he is like a celestial body which only eclipse renders measurable. He was six feet, four inches tall, but his immensity was narrow-shouldered, small-boned and unmuscular. He was vain of having, for so outsized a man, rather small feet. He usually wore neat black loafers, virtually slippers, of English leather, and, sprawling soddenly in a chair, he generally contrived to thrust his feet forward on the floor, or up on a stool, so they were noticed. I remember my mother—I must have been ten or eleven—teasing him about his dainty feet. I cannot recapture her words, but she was still slim then, and her pose as she spoke—head tilted back, hands half lifted—stuck in my mind; she so seldom struck an unmotherly attitude that it was as if a strange spirit had come and for a moment possessed her body. My uncle, presumably, responded with a dry flutter of the sheepish gallantry that he seemed to reserve for my mother and for waitresses in restaurants. My mother seemed exempt from the rather lazy distaste with which my uncle viewed the rest of the world, and perhaps, as her son, I was included in the exemption, for he was kind to me.

  He taught me gin rummy. The very name of the game excited me with visions of parlor cars and high hotel rooms full of heavy, expensive men—world-wielders—smoking cigars and playing for a dollar a point. We would play gin rummy for hours on the side porch of our homely little green-shingled house in our once-rural suburb of Providence. My uncle and his wife and daughters would visit us here once a year, always in the summer, and for exactly three days—never more. He would cite the adage about fish and guests stinking after three days, adding, “And we’re both.” The manatee is, of course, an aquatic mammal, with a flat snout and rounded tail—but my uncle was willing to twist the truth to cinch a joke.

  “Leonard, how’s your friend Christ?” would be, with each visit, the first and virtually the only question that he would direct at my father. It was a joke, but my father would answer the question seriously; his involvement with church and community affairs was so consuming that he was rarely at home in the evenings. He was older than my uncle by two years but had long ago ceased to be a challenge to him. As my father talked about church feuds and Lions’ Club politics, my uncle would sink silently deeper into his chair, a kind of fine powder of resignation would whiten his large face, and the thrust-out, exquisitely shod feet would conspicuously fidget.

  Humiliated that my uncle, who manipulated city blocks like a g
iant, should be bored by the petty details of our timid lives, I scolded my father privately. He said, “No, he’s interested. He’s my brother. You’re an only child, Freddy, so that probably doesn’t make any sense to you.”

  I was an only child, and there was little in my life beyond my uncle’s annual visits to broaden my definition of “family.” He’s my brother: this simple assertion plunged me backward into depths I could never understand. By the time I reached my mid-teens, my mind, like a soft surface lightly but repeatedly tapped, had received from these visits some confusing impressions. My father, dismissed by his brother, had turned in his heart toward Thelma, my uncle’s wife, a stoic, chain-smoking woman whose face seemed to have suffered so many jolts that certain corners of it would never relax again. She must have found much in her pious, modest brother-in-law that was soothing; she was an amateur gardener in much the same obsessed way that he was a deacon, and the two of them would go for long walks together, she looking at the vegetation, he performing altruistic errands. Sitting side by side on the couch looking at old family photographs, they seemed the siblings; there was even a physical resemblance. The skin of both had grown darker with age; their faces were wrinkled as if with the cracks of a tough varnish. Meanwhile my uncle, so fragilely pale and pink, hovering humorously on his pampered feet while my mother, more gracefully than usual, performed the motions of housework, showered upon her a kind of antic indulgence which I supposed was fraternal. These impressions, bafflingly contradicted at the end of each visit when my uncle and aunt got into their gray Cadillac with their girls and, waving, disappeared down the driveway together, suggested to me that in the depths of the mystery called “family” there lay, necessarily, an irrevocable mistake.

  “Freddy, who ate the cards?” With this absurd question my uncle would invite me to play rummy. My father would be off at work. My aunt and my mother would be somewhere in the house tugging, with the elaborate and pained tact that lay between them, the housekeeping duties back and forth. My cousins, who lived in a small chaste bivalve world in which they always faced each other, would be engaged underfoot in some conspiratorial girlish game. I would find the cards. My uncle would sit down and deal. We would play for hours on the porch, the side screens sieving the songs of insects, the sounds of traffic swelling from a whisper at noon to a waterfall roar by suppertime. Timidly I would ask if I weren’t wasting his time.