by John Updike
Into his leaden silence she cried, “Oh Piet, I’ve become such a burden.”
“No,” he lied. “I still think of you as very light and kind.”
“At any rate—hang up if Angela comes in—I think I’ve hit on something.”
“What?”
“Freddy Thorne.”
Piet laughed. “Freddy can bore it out of you. That’s called an abortion.”
“All right. I’ll hang up. I won’t bother you again. Thanks for everything.”
“No. Wait,” he shouted, fearing the receiver would already be away from her ear. “Tell me. Don’t be so touchy.”
“I’m in hell, darling, and I don’t like being laughed at.”
“That’s what hell is like.”
“Wait until you know.”
He prompted her, “Freddy Thorne.”
“Freddy Thorne once told me that dentists commit abortions. They have all the tools, the chair, anesthetic—”
“A likely story. And?”
“And last night at the Gallaghers’, you know how he gets you into a corner to be cozy, I brought the subject around, and asked him if he knew any who did it.”
“You told him you were pregnant.”
“No. Heaven forbid. I told him I knew somebody who was, a perfectly nice girl from Cambridge who was desperate.”
“True enough.”
“And—are you sure Angela isn’t listening?—”
“I’ll go to the window and see where she is.” He returned and reported, “She’s down the driveway shoveling like a woman inspired. She’s been in a very up mood lately. She was excited by the storm.”
“I wasn’t. I was driving in and out of Cambridge to donate my urine. Then we had to struggle over to the Gallaghers’.”
“And Freddy Thorne looked at you with that fuzzy squint and knew fucking damn well it was you who were pregnant.”
“Yes. He did. But he didn’t say so.”
“What did he say? He consulted his abortion schedule and gave you an appointment.”
“Not exactly. He said a very spooky thing. All this by the way was in the kitchen; the others were in the living room playing a new word game, with a dictionary. He said he’d have to meet the girl and the man.”
“That is spooky. The girl and the man.”
“Yes, and since if I’m the girl, he must guess you’re the man, I could only conclude he wants to see you.”
“You’re concluding too much. Freddy just isn’t that organized. He’s playing games. Blind man’s bluff.”
“I didn’t feel that. He seemed quite serious and definite. More his dentist self than his party self.”
“You bring out the dentist in Freddy, don’t you? I don’t want to see him. I don’t like him, I don’t trust him. I have no intention of putting us at his mercy.”
“Whose mercy do you suggest instead?”
The front door was pushed open. Deftly Piet replaced the receiver and faced the hall as if he had been just looking in the mirror. Nancy stood there, swaddled with snowy clothes. Her cheeks were aflame. Wide-eyed she held out to him on one wet leather mitten what he took to be a snowball; but it was half-gray. It was a frozen bird, with a gingery red head and a black spot on its chest, a tree sparrow caught by the blizzard. Crystals adhered to its open eye, round as the head of a hatpin. In a businesslike manner that anticipated his protests, the child explained, “Mommy found it in the snow all stiff and I’m going to put it on the radiator to get warm and come alive again even though I know it won’t.”
The Heart Fund dance was held annually at the Tarbox Amvets’ Club, a gaunt cement-block building off Musquenomenee Street. The club contained a bar and two bowling alleys downstairs and a ballroom and subsidiary bar upstairs. A faceted rotating globe hurled colored dabs of light around and around the walls, speeding at the corners, slowing above the windows, criss-crossing in crazy traffic among the feet of those dancing. No matter how cold the weather, it was always hot in the Amvets’. Whenever the doors opened, steam, tinted pink and blue by neon light, rolled out to mix with the exhaust smoke pluming from parking cars.
This year the dance was indifferently attended by the couples Piet knew. Carol Constantine was a graceful Greek dancer, and while the patriarchs and wives benignly watched from card tables laden with keftedes and dolmathes and black olives and baklava, she would lead lines hand in hand with their sons—grocers, electronic technicians, stockbrokers. Carol had the taut style, the archaic hauteur, to carry it off. But Irene Saltz was on the board of this year’s Heart Fund, and the Constantines had gone into Boston with the Thornes and Gallaghers to see the Celtics play. The Hanemas had come mostly out of loyalty to Irene, who had confided to them (don’t tell anyone, especially not Terry Gallagher) that these might be their last months in Tarbox, that Ben had been offered a job in Cleveland. The Whitmans were at a table with the Applesmiths, and the Guerins had brought the new couple. Their name was Reinhardt. They looked smooth-faced and socially anxious and Piet barely glanced at them. He only wanted, as the colored dots swirled and the third-generation Greek girls formed their profiled friezes to the Oriental keening of the bouzouki, for the American dancing to begin, so he could dance with Bea. Angela was sluggish from all her shoveling, and Foxy looked rigid with the effort of ignoring him. Only Bea’s presence, a circle like the mouth of a white bell of which her overheard voice was the chiming clapper, promised repose. He remembered her as a calm pool in which he could kneel to the depth of his navel. When the teen-aged musicians changed modes, and his arms offered to enclose her, and they had glided beyond earshot of their friends, she said, gazing away, “Piet, you’re in some kind of trouble. I can feel it in your body.”
“Maybe it’s in your body.” But she was not drunk, and held a little off from him, whereas he had had three martinis with dinner at the Tarbox Inne, and was sweating. He wanted to smear her breasts against his chest and salve his heart.
“No,” she said, singsong, refusing to yield to the questioning pressure of his arms, “it’s in you, you’ve lost your usual bounce. You don’t even stand the same. Didn’t I once tell you the unkind people would do you in?”
“Nobody’s been unkind. You’re all too kind. In that same conversation, which I’m surprised you remember, you asked me if I didn’t want to—”
“I do remember. Then you did, and didn’t come back. Didn’t you like it?”
“God, I loved it. I love you. The last time was so lovely. There was no longer any other place to go.”
“Is that why you haven’t called?”
“I couldn’t. You’re right, there is something in my life right now, a knot, an awful knot. If it ever untangles, will you have me back?”
“Of course. Always.” Yet she spoke from a distance; in sorrow he squeezed her against him, pressed her like a poultice against that crusty knot in his chest where betrayal had compounded betrayal. Frank Appleby, dancing with the Reinhardt girl, accidentally caught Piet’s eye, and biliously smiled. Lost souls. Hello in hell. Frank, having no mistress pregnant, seemed infinitely fortunate: advantages of an Exeter education. Whitewash.
Bea backed off, broke their embrace, gazing at something over his shoulder. Piet turned, frightened. Foxy had come up behind them. “Bea, it isn’t fair for you to monopolize this adorable man.” She spoke past Piet’s face and her touch felt dry and rigid on his arm. Maneuvering him to dance, she said, her voice sharp, her pale mouth bitter, “I’ve been commissioned by your wife to tell you she’s sleepy and wants to go home. But hold me a minute.” Yet her body felt angular and uneasy, and they danced as if linked by obligation. She was wearing, uncharacteristically, a cloying perfume, overripe, reminiscent of rotting iris; by the contrast Piet realized Bea’s scent had been lemony. She had floated, a ghost, in his arms.
Freddy Thorne’s office smelled of eugenol and carpet cleaner and lollypops; holding Nancy by her plump tugging hand, Piet remembered his own childhood dread of that dental odor—the clenched stomac
h, the awareness of sunlight and freedom outside, the prayer to sleep through the coming half-hour. In Freddy’s walnut magazine rack old Time and Newsweek covers showed Charles De Gaulle and Marina Oswald. Both looked haggard. Freddy’s pug-nosed receptionist smiled reassuringly at the nervous child, and Piet’s heart, though tracked to run head-on into Freddy, was shunted by a flick of gratitude into love of this girl. A crisp piece, young. Like eating celery, salting each stalk as it parted. Had Freddy ever? He doubted it. He was full of doubt of Freddy; just to picture the man filled him with a hopeless wet heaviness, like wash in a short-circuited machine.
Piet’s left palm tingled with shame. He envied little Nancy her fear of merely pain. As he tried to read a much-creased Look, his daughter rubbed against him. The wrong way. Two cats. Electricity is fear. Pedrick had once said you could picture God as electromagnetic waves. He missed the poor devil’s struggling, ought to go again. Nancy whispered, and he could not hear. Exasperated by her numb bumping, he said “What?” loudly.
The child cried “Shh!” and her hand darted to his lips. He embarrassed her. She had come to trust only her mother. Angela would normally have taken her to this appointment but today there was a meeting after nursery school and Piet, faced with fate’s challenge, reluctantly accepted. Whose mercy do you suggest instead? Now indecision and repugnance fluttered in him and only fatigue scaled his dilemma down to something that could be borne. Like waiting outside the principal’s office. Old Orff, a fierce Lutheran. Despised the Dutch. Servile Calvinism. Sir, I’m sorry, just awfully sorry, I didn’t know—You didn’t know anypody wutt be vatching? Caught swinging on the banisters in the brick-and-steel stairwell. Nancy whispered more distinctly, “Will he use the busy thing?”
“It’s called the drill. Only if you have any cavities.”
“Can you see some?” She opened her mouth wide—a huge mouth, his mouth.
“Sweetie, I can’t see any, but I’m not a dentist. If you do have any cavities, they will be little ones, because you have such little teeth, because you’re such a little girl.”
He tickled her, but her body was overheated and preoccupied and did not respond. “Tell him not to do it,” she said.
“But he must, that’s Dr. Thorne’s job. If we don’t let him fix things now, they will be much worse later.” He put his face close to hers. Like a round white blotter she absorbed his refusal to rescue him; and, refusing in turn to cry, she imprinted him with courage. They went together into Freddy’s inner office.
Once there, in the robin’s-egg-blue reclining chair, with the water chuckling in the bowl beside her ear and Dr. Thorne joking overhead with her father, Nancy somewhat relaxed, and let the dentist pick his way along the reverberating paths of her teeth. “Two,” he pronounced at last, and made the marks on his chart, and judged, “Not so bad.”
“Two cavavies?” Nancy asked. “Will they hurt?”
“I don’t think so,” Freddy answered unctuously. “Let us see how quiet you can be. The quieter you are outside, the quieter you are inside, and the quieter you are inside, the less you’ll notice the drill.”
Piet remembered the dove-gray handbook on hypnotism by Freddy’s bed, and would have made a jabbing joke about amateur psychology, but his need for mercy restrained him, and he instead asked humbly, “Should she have Novocain?”
Freddy looked down at him. “They’re very little,” he said.
Nancy withstood the first drilling in silence; but when Freddy began the second cavity without a pause a guttural protest arose in her throat. Piet moved to the other side of the chair and took her agitated hand in his. He saw into the child’s mouth, where between two ridged molars the drill, motionless in its speed, stood upright like a potted flower. Her tongue arched against the point of intrusion and Piet had to restrain her hand from lifting to her mouth. Her guttural complaint struggled into a scream. Her eyes, squared in shape by agony, opened and confronted her father’s. Piet burst into sweating; perspiration raced across his chest, armpit to armpit. The coral space of gum between Nancy’s lower lip and lower incisors was a gorge of saliva and drill spray. Her back arched. Her free hand groped upwards; Piet caught it and held it, pleading with Freddy, “Let’s stop.”
Freddy leaned down upon the now convulsive child. His lips thinned, then opened fishily. He said “Ah,” and let the drill lift itself away, done with. “There now,” he told Nancy, “that wasn’t worth all that fuss, was it?”
Her cheeks soaked, she spat into the chuckling bowl and complained, “I wanted only one.”
“But now,” her father told her, “they’re both done with and now comes the fun part, when Dr. Thorne puts in the silver!”
“Not fun,” Nancy said.
Freddy said, “She’s not easily got around, is she? Her mother’s daughter.” His smirk appeared pleased.
“You shouldn’t have plunged in so ruthlessly.”
“They were tiny. Scratches on the enamel. She frightened herself. Is she apprehensive at home?”
“She has my distrustful nature. The older girl is more stoical, like Angela.”
“Angela’s not stoical, that’s your theory. My theory is, she suffers.” Freddy’s smile implied he enjoyed access to mines of wisdom, to the secret stream running beneath reality. What a sad jerk, really. His skunk-striped assistant came in to spin the silver.
Nancy’s ordeal was over. As Freddy inserted and smoothed her fillings, Piet brought himself to ask, “Could we talk afterwards for a moment, in private?”
Freddy looked up. His eyes were monstrously enlarged by the magnifying lenses that supplemented his ordinary glasses. “I’m running behind on my appointments today.”
“OK, forget it.” Piet was relieved. “It didn’t matter. Maybe some other time.”
“Now, Handyman. Don’t be persnickety. I can fit a minute in.”
“It might take two,” Piet said, his escape denied.
Freddy said, “Allee allee done free, Nancy. You go with Jeannette and maybe she can find you a lollypop.” He ushered Piet into the small side room where his old yellow porcelain chair and equipment were kept for emergency use and cleanings. The window here looked upward over back yards toward the tip of the Congregational Church, a dab of sunstruck gold. Freddy in his sacerdotal white seemed much taller than Piet. Piet blushed. Freddy wiped his glasses and waited; years of malice had enriched that sly congested expression.
“We both know a lady—” Piet began.
“We both know several ladies.”
“A tall lady, with long blondish hair and a maiden name that’s an animal.”
“A lovely lady,” Freddy said. “I hear she’s wonderful in bed.”
“I haven’t heard that,” Piet said. “However, she and I were talking—”
“Not in bed?”
“I think not. Over the phone, perhaps.”
“I find phones, myself, so unsatisfying.”
“Have you tried masturbation?”
“Piet my pet, I don’t have much time. Spill it. I know what it is, but I want to hear you spill it.”
“This lady has told me, or maybe she told somebody else who told me, that you know gentlemen who can perform operations of a nondental nature.”
“I might. Or I might not.”
“My guess is you might not.” Piet made to shoulder past him to the closed door.
Freddy stayed him with a quiet touch, a calibrated technician’s touch. “But if I might?”
“But do you? I must trust you. Answer yes or no.”
“Try yes.”
“Then, sweet Freddy, this lady needs your friendship.”
“But old Piet, pious Piet, friend Piet, you speak of her. What about you and me? Don’t you need my friendship too?”
“It’s possible.”
“Probable.”
“OK. Probable.”
Freddy grinned; one seldom saw Freddy’s teeth. They were small and spaced and tartarish.
Piet said, “I hate this game, I�
�m going. You’re bluffing, you bluffed her into getting me to betray us. You stink.”
The bigger man stayed him again, holding his arm with injured warmth, as if their years of sarcasm and contempt had given him the rights affection claims. “I’m not bluffing. I can deliver. It’s not easy, there’s some risk to me, but it would be clean. The man’s an idealist, a crackpot. He believes in it. In Boston. I know people who have used him. What month is she in?”
“Second. Just.”
“Good.”
“It really is possible?” The good news was narcotically spreading through Piet’s veins; he felt womanish, submissive, grateful as a dog.
“I said I can deliver. Can you deliver?”
“You mean money? How much does he ask?”
“Three hundred. Four hundred. Depends.”
“No problem.”
“For the man, no. What about me?”
“You want money too?” Piet was happy to be again confirmed in his contempt for Freddy. “Help yourself. We’ll raise it.”
There was a fumbling at the door; Freddy called out, “Uno momento, Jeanette.”
But it was Nancy’s scared voice that answered: “When do we go, Daddy?”
Piet said, “One more minute, sweetie-pie. Go into the waiting room and look at a magazine. Dr. Thorne is giving me an X-ray.”
Freddy smiled at this. “You’ve become a very inventive liar.”
“It goes with the construction business. We were discussing money.”
“No we weren’t. Money isn’t discussed between old friends like you and me. Surely, old friend, we’ve gone beyond money as a means of exchange.”
“What else can I give you? Love? Tears? Eternal gratitude? How about a new skin-diving suit?”
“Boy, you do make jokes. You play with life and death, and keep making jokes. It must be why women love you. Piet, I’ll give it to you cold turkey. There’s an unbalanced matter between us: you’ve had Georgene—right?”