by John Updike
“Come!” she cries to Kathryn, holding out her hand. “You must come outdoors. Put away those dreary sheets of questions reminding us of all we’d just as soon forget.” Though her hand remains in midair some seconds, her guest doesn’t take it in hers, instead using her own hands—long, pale, workmanlike, erotically charged with a serious intent at odds with her black (or are they deep purple, an aubergine?) fingernails—to switch off the Sony and lay her neatened pages of notes on the sea-chest, after balancing them on the chair’s broad arm but thinking better of it, since the act of rising, even if done carefully, in a three-quarters unfolding move from one side of the broad plaid cushion, might tip the pages and scatter them on the floor. Hope has already risen from the rocker, feeling liberated at last, certain that her duties toward this awkward person are nearly discharged. “First,” she all but sings, “let me put on the water for tea, so we’ll have it as soon as we come back in. We’ll just go out a moment. I know you’re thinking of the time.”
“No, I wasn’t,” says Kathryn, but hesitantly.
Heedless, unstoppable now, Hope leads the way to her kitchen, past back stairs narrow and steep with each bare pine tread worn in two depressions as if by a double waterfall of footsteps. Jerry wanted to replace them, they were worn to half their original thickness in spots, but Hope always said no, she loved them as they were, testifying to all those laborious farmers’ feet clomping up to bed at the end of a weary day and then down again at dawn to begin another in the odor of breakfast meats frying, sausages and chops, oatmeal and dark bread, meals to get them through the six hours to noon. Beneath the stairs a beaded-board closet door hides brooms and a feather duster and an Electrolux and cleaning supplies that smell to Hope like sugary candy when she opens the door, which she rarely does, the supplies wait for the weekly visit of Mrs. Warren, who is always trying to give Hope a puppy, she and Jason breed Labradors in the valley as a business. The narrow door and its trim and baseboard and the window frame across this hall are painted a warm medium gray, paler than battleship yet darker than pewter, a low-gloss old-fashioned mole color Hope had picked from a chart of Colonial Williamsburg shades twenty years ago, when she and Jerry had bought the house to be a place where they could get away from everything, even television except for one channel, a place where their mortality could find them at home when it came knocking, though as it happened Jerry died in New York Hospital, between the East River and York Avenue, above but not far above the squawks of swerving taxis and wails of ambulances arriving at the emergency entrance. Hope sets the water kettle on the chipped prongs and blue flame and at the far sink verifies her impression that the rain has hesitated: the flecks on the Andersen windows actually are drying. When Kathryn came in the front door, which no one who knows the house would knock at, the strange tall girl was wearing a hooded cloak of purple cashmere mere that got tossed onto the front-hall settee, but this is too fine a garment and perhaps not warm enough for early April in Vermont. However, the mud room off the kitchen, at right angles to the corridor to the studio, has pegs for holding skis and poles and snowshoes when these exertions were still feasible and lower pegs for parkas, of which Hope had a number, mustard and maroon and buff in color, all more or less dirty from rubbing around in car trunks and their goosedown stuffing somewhat flattened by the years, these outfits for vanished, more vigorous selves hung above rows of boots, high-ankled patchworks of leather and rubber and canvas, for snow and mud; there is no need for these, the lawn is still frozen, but she does grab the mustard-colored parka for herself and thrusts another, the maroon, which looks biggest and newest and fattest—it was Jerry’s, she can see him in it for a moment, his curly gray hair, thick as wool, smartly dented by the elastic band of his yellow ski goggles before he hid it in the striped green ski cap that made him look like a chunky elf, his tanned face with its little scar off-center on the upper lip (a boyhood brawl; he grew up tough) which made him look rough-hewn and good-humored somehow; he thought she was funny was what she had loved—upon Kathryn, who stupidly drapes it around her shoulders cape-fashion, stepping warily, like a heron wading, out the back door onto the millstone that serves as a step and then down in her quite unsuitable Via Spigas with their ladders of laces and odd high heels onto the earth, which is a little muddy, here by the door, where the shaded lawn is thin on grass. Really, Hope thinks, the woman has the passive aggression of a child, whom nothing quite pleases, yet who can’t articulate an objection you might argue her out of.
“There’s the old orchard,” Hope says, gesturing in the chill dull air, in a direction up the hill past the house. “It still produces wormy apples and pears. Over here’s the bird feeder, where squirrels terrorize the chickadees and a pair of cardinals that show up, though I haven’t seen the male lately, there are runaway cats in the woods. I own twenty acres in that direction and fifteen more in this. Let’s go around to the front of the house—watch your step in this section, the moles did a terrible job on it last summer, and yet my lawn boys refuse to roll it, they say nobody owns rollers any more, it’s not part of lawn care now. When I was a girl in the Philadelphia suburbs every household had a lawn roller; you filled them with water from the garden hose and you could hear it slosh inside, it would slosh back and forth as you pushed it and almost knock you backward when you stopped, if you weren’t paying attention. Do be careful, those boots of yours aren’t as practical as they look, the soles are so smooth.” Her mind runs on into the unspoken thought that it is she, Hope, who must be careful, at her age it begins with a single misstep, an ankle, a hip, a healing that is ominously slow. Her sons will take her into their hands and end her living alone as she does, unsupervised, free. She knows they discuss her, as her parents used to discuss her when she was in bed and going to sleep above the soothing mumble of their voices.
After hours of her longing to take it into her lungs, the outdoor air is less rejuvenating than she had anticipated. She feels the irresistible lassitude that comes over an old person toward the end of the afternoon. Jerry used to speak of “pick-me-ups.” “Time for a pick-me-up,” he would say, when Hope had been intending to spend another hour in the garden or at the easel, and she blamed the daily drinking he invited for the increase in her weight. Until her mid-fifties and her third marriage, she still had a figure she needn’t be too ashamed of in shorts or a snug black dress—feminine, and thickening, and soft in the upper arms, but with a waist still and hips that didn’t look like a pair of duffle bags packed for a long trip. She couldn’t have landed Jerry if she had been in the shape she acquired as his wife.
This is the present, Hope tells herself. This bare, raw outdoor moment. I am still alive. The air is moist and gray, not quite freezing but with a breeze that cuts at her throat, where the turtleneck is loose and she did not bother to zip up her parka. The front lawn, as much hawkweed and dandelion and plantain as grass, all flattened by winter to one dun color, ends at a drystone wall mended by Jerry’s soft city hands until he got bored and paid the Warren men—Jason and his three sons and his twin bachelor brother, Ezra—to finish the job. The driveway, such as it is, comes off the road toward the house on the side with the bird feeder hung on the big beech backed by pines; Kathryn had driven her car, an orange Honda coupe with one unpainted fender left over from, presumably, a city accident, up the driveway and aggressively beyond it, parking at an angle beneath the beech where neither Hope nor the Warrens ever park. Beyond the wall, a dirt road with a high mane of hay leads to the houses of her two out-of-sight neighbors, one a retired Unitarian minister from the Syracuse area and the other a once-well-known ’forties radio personality generally assumed to be dead. “We’re up among the angels,” Jerry would joke. Beyond the road a bumpy meadow falls away, dotted with boulders and ghostly burdock stalks and a few starting cedars the mowers last fall somehow missed. The cold breeze is sharper out front, on this unsheltered expanse open to the panoramic prospect of brown and smoky blue and dull pine green from which faintly arises a whir of highw
ay traffic in the valley, cars and trucks hurtling unseen on Route 89. She zips the parka up to her chin. The far mountains overlap in waves like viscid, studiously continuous blue brush-strokes on glass. The clouds above align in advancing rolls of mottled vapor. A few fine cold drops prick her face and the back of her pointing hand. “That’s Camels Hump,” she says. “A nice afternoon’s climb twenty years ago, when I was younger.” This is it, she thinks again, this drab present, this overcast radiance, colder and bleaker than April should be, this moist air sharp in her shallow lungs, this brimming vacancy of the seen. Witnessing the world alongside another makes her realize how little it all is, how brief and even negligible compared with our soul’s expectations and bottomless appetite. A world made to our measure would go on forever. Instead, the million million molecules of H2O overhead, and the thousands of leafless trees that from miles away blend into a tone of blue, a neutral yet delicately packed color like the blue-green-gray-pink background so frequent in Cézanne’s later still lifes, and the myriad microscopic structures that bestow consciousness upon us all so quickly slip away.
“Quickly,” she says to her mute companion. “You must see my garden. On the other side of the house.” They make their way across the frozen uneven turf, where a few wrinkled shoulders of ledge jut from the lawn, frozen flow from a fire that turned rocks molten millions or was it billions of years ago, these two women unequal in age and height but yoked together by a sisterly determination to make the moment succeed, a moment like the thinnest possible skin of time, thinner than lichen, on the rocks’ enduring unknowing. But the garden, lovingly extended and fenced while Jerry was still alive, and still tended by Hope to the extent her strength permits, with no more summer help than the Warren men can spare from more manly jobs and she can coax from Mildred and Jason’s daughter, an overweight teen-age girl with her thoughts miles away, hopelessly stupid on boys and music, music she wears on her head in rustling earphones, music to drown out the merest sliver of a thought if any were to wander into her poor brain, Hope cannot believe she herself was ever that besotted, music came to her over her parents’ radio and hardly grazed her consciousness, nasal men singing through megaphones, New York hotel music piping with muted trumpets, even in the war you danced when the music, the swing, was there but you didn’t wear it on your head like a dunce cap—the garden presents almost nothing to see: the stubble of last summer’s phlox and a few hosta leaves left flattened on the earth when she ripped it up hastily one unseasonably cold October day, her hands hurting, and a rusting wire peony-support unaccountably overlooked and then lost for months under snow. Dead, dead as sticks appear the writhing thorned stems of the pink rambler she has trained through the lattice of the green fence she and Jerry had the Warren twins put up to give the multicolored canvas of the garden, as it were, a frame. Jason was the outgoing bluff one, the salesman, but Ezra was the craftsman.
“It must be beautiful in the summer,” Kathryn says, lamely, though Hope can’t blame her for that, it is a lame occasion, she wonders now why she was so keen to get outdoors.
“It’s English-style,” Hope tells her guest, “that is, crowded and blowsy, and I tend to lose my enthusiasm toward the end of June, when it gets hot, even up here.”
Already she sees, in the earth that has hardly begun to awaken, cracks indicating softening and refreeze, and the rounded tongues of daffodils and the pointed tongues of daylilies beginning to poke through. On the front of the house, the southern side, next to the sun-warmed Barre granite of the foundation, snowdrops and crocuses are already pushing up to flower. Green threads of garlic will soon appear in the lawn. The garden and its care seems a suffocating challenge, a cruel hill she must climb into the future. She cannot get enough of the day’s darkening air into her lungs; her lungs are emphysematous from decades of heedless smoking. It wasn’t until her marriage to Guy and its pregnancies that she stopped, Guy had never smoked and complained about the smell of ashtrays in the apartment, there was something prissy and whining about him that she refused to let herself dislike; the public that saw him as the embodiment of mad invention, of irreverent Pop revolt against the seven centuries of painterly tradition since Giotto would have been disappointed to know what an orderly and abstemious prig he in fact was. He drank in moderation, rarely anything stronger than wine, and smoked grass with her the last time when they took the vacation in Mexico, their marriage’s last gasp; they arrived by 727 instead of by Route 10 in a sandy two-tone ’56 Nash Rambler with a biracial, bisexual duo with great bodies and vague ambitions, but as soon as she and Guy landed in Guadalajara the moon did look bigger, like a piece of display pottery, and its pale light smelled of flowers, the tree flowers that soaked in the night dew and closed when dawn opened with cockcrows. Her husband scored a little pot from a kid on the street just outside the Hilton, and that sweet evening on the balcony in their underwear did carry her back to 1958. She had gone with Guy for a wild ride, but the ride had turned out to be tame and to end with a jolt. The jolt had been building; he knew that tameness was the undoer of art and that no twentieth-century art movement keeps its kick for ten years if that, the label dries up and curls off; though artists live forever with modern medicine, their moment becomes a corpse and there is no reversing the dissolution, resurrection flies in the face of molecular biology, Guy would have been sensitive enough to feel himself a walking corpse, with a wife well past fifty and three hostages to fortune receiving expensive private educations, no wonder he turned to tight-assed Gretchen, for a lighter ride.
“Kathryn, I was thinking,” Hope says, her voice coming out tight and breathy under the pressure of being outdoors, “looking toward Camels Hump—Jerry and I used to climb it easily, even though we weren’t young even then, with a lunch basket and a bottle of wine—thinking about human animals, how marvellous the biological machinery that gives us consciousness, and how we mostly just throw it away; even if we don’t commit suicide, we presume to find life dull and be bored most of the time, and discontented, and just waste it; I bet that’s why Hamlet appeals to us so much, out of all Shakespeare’s plays, it’s the one we take personally, it expresses this disregarded quality of life, the waste of our minds, our bodies, of everything that should make us joyful and careful. Am I making any sense?” For she can go too far, she knows; since childhood she has felt her overflowing spirit back up, meeting resistance in the faces of others, the blood in her own face damming in a blush.
The tall young woman pulls her borrowed parka, stupidly worn like a cape, tighter around her shoulders, her face looking chalky out here in the open, a pimple visible where her nostril wing meets the cheek, traces of plastery powder on her arched nose. Cautiously she responds, “I don’t think anyone would say you’ve wasted your life. That’s what makes it so interesting to me.”
“Oh? Really? You’re honestly interested? To me it all seems terribly scattered—as my daughter says, a lot of catering to men, and then painting in ways that the men said irritated them, and now that it’s almost too late, painting in a way that seems true to myself but maybe is an escape from myself, from the color of the world, which in that rather pompous statement of mine you read to me I said was the Devil—how weird of me to mention the Devil, I know you must think, but there is something out there, if you have any feeling for goodness at all, that resists it, that pushes the other way. I know you and your generation will think me quite mad, but God’s non-existence is something I can’t get used to, it seems unnatural.”
Kathryn’s lips—intricate braids of muscle, looked at up close in this cold outdoor light, designed to give her and others pleasure, if she doesn’t fear contamination; but how can her generation not fear contamination, just as Hope’s feared constraint?—fumble at her next words, her brain perhaps numbed by this un-asked-for venture into the great outdoors, where small cold raindrops are tearing little holes in the veil of sensation. Or perhaps, if she is Jewish, she is unable to put the question of God quite the way a Christian would put it, i
n urgent terms of either/or. For the chosen people the relation has evolved beyond the possibility of dropped acquaintance into that of a familiarity that breeds contempt: so Bernie once expounded it to Hope, his weary bulk redolent of sweat and cigarettes beside her in bed while his canvases below them sent up their unheard cries of flat, passionate color. Being Jewish amused him; he played with it, he heaped its ashes on his dandy’s head and turned its tribal fury into visionary Socialism. Kathryn hesistantly states, “An old boyfriend of mine, studying at graduate school to be a physicist at Columbia, told me that with the thorough understanding they have now there’s really no place for God in the universe.”
“In us, dear. The place is in us, weak and silly as we are.”
“As he explained it, it’s a matter of energy, the equations. Eventually everything will get very far from everything else and trillions of years will go by, with everything dead and dark. There will be no place where we could be, even as pure souls. They need energy too.”
The words chill Hope. Raindrops are unignorably falling on their hands and faces, and pattering on their Gore-Tex parkas. “I’m sure he’s right, from one point of view,” Hope says impatiently. “But look up there, in the woods, you can just make out a glimmer of the springhouse roof. And you can see the path that takes you up to it, and to an even bigger view. Every summer we have to take down some trees to keep the view open. I say ’we,’ but of course it’s men I hire who do it. A family of chauvinists who hate taking direction from a woman.”