Seek My Face

by John Updike

  In the living room, where Hope wanders with the day’s last handful of unsalted almonds, her attention gravitates to objects salvaged from the Germantown and Ardmore houses, ones her surviving brother did not claim. On the top of a simple square curly-maple sewing table she sees a worn blue-and-red cotton runner whose faded threads still describe two stylized Arabian birds whose exact anatomy her childish eyes had puzzled over, and a peened copper ashtray still holding the smudge of her father’s stubbed-out Chesterfields, and a crude ceramic candlestick with a celadon glaze and jaunty handles like the arms of a man with his hands on his hips: meaning had inhered in these objects before she had words to weaken meaning, her hands and eyes had explored them in the silent anteroom just this side of her entry into the world. At the back of the next-to-top shelf of a glass-fronted breakfront there are two curious vases that she tried to paint in watercolor when she was taking lessons from Rudolph Hartz. One was heavy and brown, so heavy it felt full though it was always empty, with a dumpy waist and purple streaks in its glaze, and the other vase cylindrical and diagonally streaked somewhat like a barber pole in strands of muddy color, reminding her of marbled endpapers in a fancy book or, now, of the colors in the wings of the angel kneeling in the Annunciation Fra Angelico had painted on the gallery wall at the head of the stairs in the Convent of San Marco. It was a deathless work but showy, in its feathers and pillars and flowers, the cloistered painter guilty of virtuosity; Hope preferred, when she toured the convent with Jerry two decades ago, the severer Annunciation in a monk’s cell, two feminine creatures transfixed in a bare room.

  How she had stared at those vases in the light of the Ardmore side porch!—stared and mixed colors in the indentations of the lid of the watercolor set, its rainbow broken into concave squares, stealing with her wet brush from one square a lick of red and from another a trembling drop of blue, seeking in dabbling them together the equivalent of the gleaming purplish-brown of the waisted thick-skinned vase, or of the muddy many-colored swirl on the straight-sided other. The world was all colors but never unmixed ones. This vanished world held pieces of furniture that she can still picture—a red-stained pine corner cupboard; a coal stove her grandmother had cooked on in the German-town house, pulling with a flowered asbestos mitten a sheet of raisin cookies from its clanking black belly; a four-postered bed that supported its mattress on ropes and creaked instead of bounced when you jumped on it; the hassock, with its long triangular pie-slices of colored leather for a top, that “lived,” the expression was, in Grandpa’s sun-room, along with the potted philodendrons and the maple magazine-rack subdivided in the middle by a partition with a wide hole near the edge for fingers to lift it by. It stood, loaded with magazines which went out of business half a century ago, next to her grandfather’s plaid chair; he faithfully read The Saturday Evening Post, romance stories and all, his head tipped back to get the benefit of his bifocals.

  In her underwear, Hope sits on the broad-armed plaid chair and spreads the fingers of one hand on the curved oak. Her thumb and little finger easily reach from side to side. The back of her hand is mottled and scarred by sun and age as if once scalded, the more prominent veins making patterns like wiggly letters she can almost read, random little rivers that have stayed in their courses all her life. The swelling of arthritis in a number of joints has caused the top segments of her fingers to deviate from the straight. She marvels that this gnarled crone’s hand is hers.

  Her grandfather enters the room with his soft, sly tread. Though not tall, he moves about his big house in a stealthy crouch, the proprietor’s artful pretense of being the meekest of men. Hope starts guiltily at being discovered in his chair, but he appears amused, his eyes jumping from one degree of magnification to the other as he moves his tidy gray head up and down, surveying her. He looks to her gray all over, his straight hair parted in the middle and much mixed with white, his sweater-vest gray over his collarless striped shirt, his trousers once black in color but so often ironed and worn back into baggy knees that they are dull as a shadow, his hightop shoes so creased they take their shine in stripes. The hole where the collar button should go shows, and his long-cuffed sleeves are held in place by black elastics above the elbow. A smell comes off him like that of the winter clothes kept all summer in the tall cedar closet. With comical formality he lifts a hand as if to halt the traffic of her mind to give his words passage: “Do not unsettle thyself. What wast thee measuring with thy hand?”

  The child she long ago was lacked the words to explain. “Just seeing something,” she began, and stopped.

  After a pause he offered, “That is a pleasant seat from which to view Creation. My plans had been to sit with yesterday’s Evening Bulletin, searching for tidings I may have missed, and to wait for the afternoon mail. The good Mr. Brubaker generally delivers by three-thirty o’clock, if he omits to tarry in conference with the Widow Kendall up the street. It is written in the Constitution, evidently, that the foremost duty of the Post Office Department is to gather the gossip of every domicile.”

  “It is?”

  “In a manner of speaking, child. As it seems, so it becomes. I made what in common parlance is called a joke. Tell me, is there, for young ladies, no playing today, no visiting playmate?”

  He saw into her life. Flattered, Hope rendered a full report. “Freddy Traphagen came over but had to go home. Gramma walked to the butcher shop to buy a roast and scrapple but I didn’t want to go along, I hate all the blood and the way the man in the big apron smiles at me. Mama is taking a nap and said I wasn’t to make any noise. You and I could play Fish.” Her face felt hot from trying to rise to this attention he was paying her, in such grave and courtly fashion.

  “Indeed we could, though I would slightly have to read-just my aforesaid plans. Instead, we might hunt for treasure.”

  “Hunt for treasure?”

  “If I close my eyes, I have an inkling where some might be hidden. But thee will have to readjust thy position on our chair. Thee will have to kneel beside it. Thy hand is so slim and small compared with my own; do me a kindness, granddaughter, and squeeze it down between the two cushions.”

  She looked at his hand, hanging half curled at the level of the trouser pocket that held his bone-handled pocket-knife, with which he not only pared apples and peaches in long spiralling strips but cut his own fingernails; when he pared his fingernails, his mouth, more flexible than hers because his teeth could come out, shrivelled in concentration, and his eyes got enormous in the lower half of his glasses. She saw that he was right, his hand was lumpy and wrinkled, brown like newspapers kept for years at the bottom of drawers, and his fingers had edges like the rounded backs of books or chocolate fingers where they had hardened on the candy-maker’s tray. Hope had watched from the pavement on Chelten Avenue candy being made through the big window near the shoe store when she shopped with Mama; the chocolate came out of the big pot steamy and gooey, but hardened, very quickly, giving the fat woman sitting surrounded by of all this sweetness just time to scribble a design on top with her spoon, fast as light.

  Obediently Hope knelt beside the chair and pushed her own hand, small and round with fat between the joints, into the crease, which was scarily tight at first. She felt around in a secret clothy space, praying no spider would bite or centipede with its horrible wavy legs would fasten on. Under the flat cloth were the bumps of metal that held it firm from beneath, and over on one side, when she was about to give up, her arm feeling squeezed as if by a mean boy, her fingertips met the curved hard edges of one—no, two—circular small objects. Carefully pinching, she brought them up and showed them on her palm: two coins, one big and silver and the other small and brown. The brown one she knew was a penny, but the larger she had never handled before. “What is this?” she asked her grandfather.

  “Canst thee not read?” he asked.

  “Not words yet. The kindergarten teacher told us that comes next year, in first grade.” Miss Fox had big teeth that overlapped and spoiled he
r natural beauty, Mama said. Mama knew about beauty and told Hope she would never be beautiful but a radiant spirit could make up for it.

  “Not even numbers and the alphabet?”

  “Maybe,” she said, not sure if she was lying.

  Her grandfather’s voice had acquired a pleading wheeziness. “Take the big coin to the light at the window, young lady, and tell me what thine eyes detect.”

  The air over here borrowed a blue tinge from the hydrangeas outside the window, crowded head upon head as if jostling to look in, to get out of the sun that was bleaching their blue. “There’s a lady walking into a big ball, the sun is setting—”

  “Or rising, some would say.”

  “And under her feet are some little numbers—one, nine, two, two.”

  “That is the year it was minted, the same as thyself. And what is on the other side?”

  “A scary bird, walking the same way.”

  “A warlike eagle. Our national emblem. Benjamin Franklin thought the wild turkey would be more suitable.”

  “There are a lot of words around him.”

  “At the bottom, can you spell those letters?”

  This was hard. Why did they make these coins so they looked so old-fashioned and jumbled? She felt a crabbed divine force pressing on the design, making it obscure. “ ‘H,’ I think, like in my name, and ‘A,’ and—it’s the one with the single foot—”

  “ ‘L,’ ” he said. “Unsounded, in the illogical way of the English language. “A half-dollar, my child. A fifty-cent piece,” her grandfather announced, his voice changed again, more settled in his chest. “It is thine, with my blessing.”

  Hope turned from the window and saw that he had sat in the broad-armed chair. That was why his voice had sounded slightly different. He had stolen her place. Already he had eased his weary shoes up on the hassock with the fancy leather pie-pieces, though Hope has more than once heard Gramma tell him not to do that, it put dirt in the seams. “Hey,” she said. “That was my chair.”

  Her grandfather didn’t seem to hear. He met her protest with a serene gray-blue gaze split by his bifocals, a gaze into which her child’s eyes read total approval, a bifocal love from both near and far, up close and everlasting.

  Hope smiles, recalling the old man’s trick, and realizes that he had planted the coins there, for her to discover one day of his choosing. The half-dollar and the penny had a suspicious symmetry; the date on the bigger coin was too fortuitous. From that day on she searched between the cushions so faithfully that sometimes there were no coins—they had not had time to grow—and rarely more than a dime. Sometimes there was a paper clip, another time a black Smith Brothers coughdrop with the raised star on it, and once his pocketknife, which had slid from his pocket into the crevice. When she returned the bone-handled knife her grandfather’s gray eyebrows shot up in surprise and he rewarded her with a quarter. Hope thinks of exploring between the two big plaid cushions right now, but her back and hip hurt in anticipation of getting down, grunting, on her knees on the oval rag rug, and she is afraid of finding nothing.

  Also by John Updike

  POEMS

  The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953—1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)

  NOVELS

  The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Villages (2005) • Terrorist (2006) • Widows of Eastwick (2009)

  SHORT STORIES

  The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems and Other Stories (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953—1975 (2003) • Three Stories (2003) • My Fathers Tears (2009) • The Maple Stories (2009)

  ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007)

  PLAY

  Buchanan Dying (1974)

  MEMOIR

  Self-Consciousness (1989)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1995)

  John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. He was the father of four children and the author of fifty-odd previous books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Howells Medal. He died in 2009.