by John Updike
Forsythia like a dancing yellow fog was out in backyards and along fences and hedges and garages, the same yellow, continuous, dancing yard to yard, trespassing. Forgive us. Piet drove on down Prudence Street past the Guerins’. Nicely restored, six thou, one of their first jobs in Tarbox, Gallagher not so greedy then, Adams and Comeau did all the finish work, nobody under sixty knows how to hang a door. The whole frame had sagged. Dry rot. The uphill house sill buried in damp earth. They had threaded a reinforcing rod eighteen feet long through the summer beam up through a closet to an ironshod A-brace in the attic. Solid but still a touch off true. Why don’t you want to fuck me? Good question. Loyalty to Georgene, offshoot loyalty, last year’s shoot this year’s limb, mistress becomes a wife. Sets. Determined set of Georgene’s chin. Not always attractive. Coke-bottle eyes, nude like rancid butter, tarpaper grits, Freddy’s spies. Piet’s thoughts shied from a green plastic spoon.
Downhill a mailman gently sloped away from the pull of his bag. Blue uniform, regular hours, walk miles, muscles firm, live forever. At the corner two dogs were saying hello. Hello. Olleh.
He drove along Musquenomenee Street, along the river, tidal up to the factory waterfall, low at this moment, black salt mud gleaming in wide scummy puddled flats, the origin of life. Across the river were high-crowned streets of elms and homes with oval windows and leaded fanlights built in the tinkling decades of ice wagons. Knickers, mustaches, celluloid collars: nostalgic for when he had never been. Piet saw no one. No one walked now. The silver maples were budding in reddish florets but the elms in tan tassels. Rips in a lilac sky. Nature, this sad grinding fine, seed and weed.
His spirits slightly lifted as he passed the Protestant cemetery, fan-shaped acres expanding from a Puritan wedge of tilted slate stones adorned with winged skulls and circular lichen. Order reigned. Soon cemeteries and golf courses the last greenswards. Thronging hungry hoardes, grain to India. On the golf course he spotted two lonely twosomes. Too early, mud, heavy lies, spikes chew up the green, proprietors greedy for fees, praise restraint, earth itself hungry, he had thrown it a sop. Pet. Pit. He drove through pastel new developments, raw lawns and patchwork façades, and up a muddy set of ruts beside which hydrants and sewer ports were already installed, in obedience to town ordinances, to his site on Indian Hill.
The bulldozer had arrived. This should have pleased him but the machine, a Case Construction King with hydraulic backhoe and front loader, crushed him with its angry weight, its alarming expense. Twenty-five dollars to move it in, twenty-two fifty per hour with the driver, a large coveralled Negro from Mather. Sitting on his jarring throne, he conveyed the impression that the machine’s strength was his strength, and that if the gears ceased to mesh he would himself swing down and barehanded tear the stumps from the outraged red earth. By no extension of his imagination could Piet believe that he had helped cause this man and machine to be roaring and churning and chuffing and throttling here, where birds and children used to hide. Yet the Negro hailed him, and his young foreman Leon Jazinski eagerly loped toward him across the gouged mud, and the work was going smoothly. Stumps whose roots were clotted with drying mud and boulders blind for aeons had been heaped into a towering ossuary that must be trucked away. Now the Negro was descending, foot by foot, into the first cellar hole, diagrammed with string and red-tipped stakes. This house would have the best view, overlooking the fan-shaped cemetery toward the town with its pricking steeple and flashing cock. The other two would face more southerly, toward Lacetown, an indeterminate area of gravel pits and back lots and uneconomic woods strangely intense in color, purple infused with copper; and should bring a thousand or two less. Piet saw the first house, the house where he stood, pine siding stained redwood and floor plan C, seeded terrace lawn linked by five fieldstone steps to the hardtopped driveway of the under-kitchen garage, smart flagstone stoop and three-chime front doorbell, baseboard oil-fired forced-hot-water heating and brick patio in the rear for summer dining and possible sunbathing, aluminum combination all-weather sash and rheostated ceiling fixtures set flush, efficient kitchen in Pearl Mist and Thermopane picture window, as bringing $19,900, or at a knockdown eighteen five if Gallagher panicked, a profit above wages paid even to himself, one-fifty weekly, of three or four, depending on how smoothly he dovetailed the subcontractors, which suddenly didn’t seem enough, enough to placate Gallagher, enough to justify this raging and rending close at his back, this rape of a haven precious to ornamental shy creatures who needed no house. Builders burying the world God made. The two-headed tractor, the color of a school bus, trampled, grappled, growled, ramped. Blue belches of smoke flew upward from the hole. The mounted Negro, down to his undershirt, a cannibal king on a dragon dripping oil, grinned and shouted to Piet his pleasure that he had not encountered ledge.
“This is the soft side of the hill,” Piet shouted, and was not heard. He felt between himself and the colored man a continental gulf, the chasm between a jungle asking no pity and a pampered rectilinear land coaxed from the sea. The Negro was at home here, in this tumult of hoisted rocks, bucking reversals of direction and shifting gears, clangor and fumes, internal combustion, the land of the free. He was Ham and would inherit. Piet tried to picture the young couple who would live in this visualized home and he did not love them. None of his friends would live in such a home. He stooped and picked a bone from its outline in the earth, where the grid of the dozer’s tread had pressed it, and showed it curiously to Jazinski.
“Cow bone,” Leon said.
“Doesn’t it seem too delicate?”
“Deer?”
“Don’t they say there was an Indian burying ground somewhere on this south side?”
Jazinski shrugged. “Beats me.” Leon was a weedy, hollow-chested young man originally from Nashua, New Hampshire. He was one of the three men that Gallagher & Hanema kept on the payroll all year long. The other two were venerable carpenters, Adams and Comeau, that Piet had inherited from Ed Byrd, an excessively amiable Tarbox contractor who had declared bankruptcy in 1957. Piet had himself singled out Jazinski from a dozen summer laborers two summers ago. Leon had a good eye and a fair head, an eye for the solid angle and the overlooked bind and a sense for the rhythmic mix of bluff and guess whereby a small operator spaces men and equipment and rentals and promises to minimize time, which is money. Gallagher, who discreetly craved the shoddy—vinyl siding versus wood, pressed wallboard panels versus plaster—had intended to lay Jazinski off last winter; Piet had begged him to hold the boy, offering to drop his own salary to one-twenty-five, fearing that something of himself, his younger self, would be lost if they failed to nurture a little longer Leon’s uneducated instinct for the solid, the tight, the necessary.
Piet felt that the bone in his hand was human. He asked Leon, “Have you seen any arrowheads turn up? Beads, bits of pot?”
Leon shook his slow slender head. “Just crap,” he said. “Mother Earth.”
Embarrassed, Piet said, “Well, keep your eyes open. We may be on sacred ground.” He let the bone, too small to have been a thigh, perhaps part of an arm, drop. On Leon’s face, downcast beneath a blond eave of hair, Piet spied the smudge of a sneer. In his tone that meant business, the warmth withdrawn, Piet asked, “When can we pour? Early next week?”
“Depends.” The boy was sulking. “I’m here all by myself, if Adams and Comeau could stop diddling with that garage …”
“They’re not to be hurried.”
“Waterproofing the foundation takes at least a day.”
“It has to be done.”
“If it wasn’t, who’d be the wiser?”
Piet said swiftly, seeing he must pounce now, or the boy would be a cheat forever, “We would. And in a few years when the house settled and the basement leaked everybody would. Let me tell you about houses. Everything outs. Every cheat. Every short cut. I want the foundation damp-proofed, I want polyethylene under the slab, I want lots of gravel under the drain tile as well as over it, I want you to wrap felt a
round the joints or they’ll sure as hell clog. Don’t think because you cover something up it isn’t there. People have a nose for the rotten and if you’re a builder the smell clings. Now let’s look at the drawings together.”
Leon’s avoiding cheek flushed under the discipline. He gazed at the hole growing in the earth and said, “Those old clunkers have been a month on a garage me and two kids could have put up in a week.”
Piet’s pedagogic spurt was spent. He said wearily, “They’re winding up, I’ll go over and see if they can’t be up here by tomorrow. I’ll call for a load of gravel this afternoon and see if we can set up Ready-Mix over in North Mather for next Monday, do the three at once, that’ll give you a day each, I’ll help myself if we can’t squeeze some trade-school kids out of Gallagher.” For an hour, using as a table a boulder under the low boughs of a great oak that would overshadow the patio, he and Leon analyzed the blueprints bought by mail from an architectural factory in Chicago. Piet felt the younger mind picking for holes in his, testing, resenting. It grew upon him as they plotted their campaign together that Leon disliked him, had heard enough about his life to consider him a waster, a drinker, an immigrant clown in the town’s party crowd, unfaithful to his wife, bored by his business. This appraisal blew coolly on Piet’s face as he traced lines and dimensions with his broad thumbnail and penciled in adjustments demanded by this sloping site. Leon nodded, learning, yet did not let up this cool pressure, which seemed part of the truth of these woods, where the young must prey upon the not-so-young, the ambitious upon the preoccupied. Piet was impatient to leave the site.
In parting, he turned for a moment to the Negro, who had retired with a lunch box and thermos bottle to the edge of the excavation. The sliced sides showed a veined logic of stratification. Pages of an unread book. Impacted vegetable lives. Piet asked him, “Do you ever find Indian graves?”
“You see bones.”
“What do you do when you see them?”
“Man, I keep movin’.”
Piet laughed, feeling released, forgiven, touched and hugged by something human arrived from a great distance, imagining behind the casually spoken words a philosophy, a night life.
But the Negro’s lips went aloof, as if to say that laughter would no longer serve as a sop to his race. His shoulder-balls bigger than soccer balls. His upper lip jeweled with sweat. A faint tarry tigerish smell. Piet, downwind, bowed.
Pardon me, Dr. King.
Piet left the two men in the clearing and drove into town, to the far end of Temperance Avenue, where Adams and Comeau were building a garage at the rear of a house lot. Comeau was thin and Adams was fat, but after years of association they moved as matched planets, even at opposite corners of the garage revolving, backs turned, with an unspoken gravitational awareness of the other. Passing to the toolbox, on a board between sawhorses, they crossed paths but did not bump. Neither acknowledged Piet. He stood in the empty rectangle that awaited a track-hung spring-lift garage door; he inhaled the scent of shaved lumber, the sense of space secured. Except for the door, the structure seemed complete. Piet cleared his throat and asked, “When do you gentlemen think we can call it quits here?”
Adams said, “When it’s done.”
“And when might that be? I don’t see a day’s work here, just the door to come.”
“Odds and ends,” Comeau told him. He was applying a plane to the inside of the window sash, though the sash was factory-made. Adams was screwing in L-shaped shelf brackets between two studs. Adams smoked a pipe and wore bibbed overalls with as many pockets as a hardware store has drawers; Comeau’s blue shirts were always freshly laundered and cigarettes had stained his fingers orange. He added, “Once we finish up, the widow’ll have to manage herself.” The property belonged to a young woman whose husband, a soldier, had been killed—knifed—by the German boy friend of his girl friend in Hamburg.
“It ought to be left neat,” Adams said.
Piet, inspecting, paused at a detail of the framing. A two-by-four diagonal brace intersected a vertical stud and, though the angle was not an easy one, and this was rough work, the stud had been fitted as precisely as a piece of veneer. Waste. Piet felt as if he had been handed a flower; but had to say, “Leon needs you on the hill to knock together the basement forms.”
“Jack be nimble,” old Comeau said, shaking out a match. It was their nickname for Jazinski.
“Door isn’t come up yet from Mather,” Adams said.
Piet said, “I’ll call them. If it isn’t brought this afternoon, come up to the hill tomorrow morning anyway. This is a beautiful garage for the widow, but at six-fifty an hour enough is enough. She’ll have boy friends who can put up shelves for her. I must get back to the hill.”
As he walked around the garage to the street, he heard Comeau, who was still planing at the window, say, “Greedy Gally’s on his back.”
Piet drove home. The square yard and house were welcoming, empty. He carried the wood and wire he had bought into his basement workshop, which he hadn’t used all winter. He cut some segments of the 2” pine but discovered that the warpage of the rolled wire was so strong that a cumbersome system of braces would be needed to hold the sides straight. So he formed in his mind another design, using the warp of the wire as a force, and rooted a parabolic curve of mesh on either side of the plywood with the poultry staples, and then cut an oval of wire to seal the cage shut. But one end had to be a door. He improvised hinges from a coat hanger and fitted sticks for the necessary stiffness. As he worked, his hands shook with excitement, the agitation of creation that since childhood had often spoiled his projects—birdhouses, go-carts, sand castles—in the final trembling touches. The cage, completed, seemed beautiful to him, a transparent hangar shaped by laws discovered within itself, minimal, invented, Piet’s own. He foresaw Ruth’s pleased surprise, Angela’s grudging admiration, Nancy’s delight and her insistence on crawling inside this child-sized shelter. He carried the cage upstairs to the kitchen and, needing to share his joy of accomplishment, dialed the Thornes’ number. “Is this the Swedish bakery?” It was their formula, to which she could say No.
Georgene laughed. “Hi, Piet. How are you?”
“Miserable.”
“Why?”
He told her about the hamster and the dismal work on Indian Hill, but could not specifically locate the cause of his depression, his sense of unconnection among phenomena and of falling. The lack of sun and shadows. Angela’s aloofness. The Negro’s snub. The slowness of spring to come.
Georgene said, “Poor Piet. My poor little lover.”
He said, “Not much of a day for the sunporch, is it?”
“I’ve been in the house cleaning. I’m having the League Board tonight and Irene frightens me, she’s so efficient and worthy.”
“How’s Freddy’s finger?”
“Oh, fine. He took it out of the spoon yesterday.”
“I felt crummy about that. I don’t see why I should want to hurt him since in a way, without knowing it of course, he lets me have you.”
“Is that the way you think of it? I thought I let you have me.”
“You do, you do. Thank you. But why do I have such a hatred of him?”
“I have no idea.” Always, over the telephone, there was the strangeness of their not being able to touch, and the revelation that her firm quick voice could be contentious.
He asked politely, “Could I—would you like me to come visit you for a minute? Just to say hello, we don’t have time to make love. I must get back to the hill.”
Her pause, in which they could not touch, was most strange. “Piet,” she said, “I’d love you to—”
“But?”
“But I wonder if it’s wise right this noon. I’ve had something happen to me.”
Pregnant. By whom? There was a mirror above the telephone table and in it he saw himself, a pale taut-faced father, the floor tipped under him.
She went on, hesitating, she who had confided everything to h
im, her girlish loves, her first sex with Freddy, when they made love now, her periods, her mild momentary yearnings toward other men, everything, “I think I’ve discovered that Freddy is seeing Janet. I found a letter in the pocket of a suit I was taking to the cleaner’s.”
“How careless of him. Maybe he wanted you to find it. What did it say?”
“Nothing very much. It said, ‘Let’s break it off, no more phone calls,’ et cetera, which might mean anything. It could mean she’s putting on pressure for him to divorce me.”
“Why would she want to marry Freddy?” He realized this was tactless and tried to disguise it with another question. “You’re sure it’s her?”
“Quite. She signed it J and anyway her handwriting is unmistakable, big and fat and spilly. You’ve seen it on her Christmas cards.”
“Well. But sweet, it’s been in the air for some time, Freddy and Janet. Does it really shock you?”
“I suppose,” Georgene said, “there’s something called female pride. But more than that. I’m shocked by the idea of divorce. If it comes to that I don’t want him to have anything to throw back at me, for the children to read about in the paper. It wouldn’t bother Freddy but it would me.”