Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  For freshmen at the Constable School were to start off banished from the school itself, with its bright chatter and gay smocks, and sent into these dim galleries to “draw from the antique.” The newcomers—Leonard and four other resentful American veterans and one wispy English boy and a dozen sturdy English teen-age girls—straggled each morning into the museum, gripping a drawing board under one arm and a bench called a “horse” under the other, and at dusk, which came early to the interior of the museum, returned with their burdens, increased by the weight of a deity pinned to their boards, in time to see the advanced students jostle at the brush-cleaning sink and the nude model, incongruously dressed in street clothes, emerge from her closet. The school always smelled of turpentine at this hour.

  Its disconsolate scent lingering in his head, Leonard left the school alone, hurrying down the three ranks of shallow steps just in time to miss his bus. Everywhere he turned, those first weeks, he had this sensation of things evading him. When he did board his bus, and climbed to the second deck, the store fronts below sped backwards as if from pursuit—the chemist’s shops that were not exactly drugstores, the tea parlors that were by no means luncheonettes. The walls of the college buildings, crusty and impregnable, swept past like an armada of great gray sails, and the little river sung by Drayton and Milton and Matthew Arnold slipped from under him, and, at right angles to the curving road, red suburban streets plunged down steep perspectives, bristling with hedges and spiked walls and padlocked chains. Sometimes, suspended between the retreating brick rows like puffs of flak, a flock of six or so birds was turning and flying, invariably away. The melancholy of the late English afternoon was seldom qualified for Leonard by any expectation of the night. Of the four other Americans, three were married, and although each of these couples in turn had him over for supper and Scrabble, these meals quickly vanished within his evenings’ recurrent, thankless appetite. The American movies so readily available reaffirmed rather than relieved his fear that he was out of contact with anything that might give him strength. Even at the school, where he had decided to place himself at least provisionally under the influence of Professor Seabright’s musty aesthetic, he began to feel that indeed there was, in the precise contour of a shoulder and the unique shape of space framed between Apollo’s legs, something intensely important, which, too—though he erased until the paper tore and squinted till his eyes burned—evaded him.

  Seabright tried to visit the students among the casts once a day. Footsteps would sound briskly, marking the instructor off from any of the rare sightseers, often a pair of nuns, who wandered, with whispers and a soft slithering step, into this section of the museum. Seabright’s voice, its lisp buried in the general indistinctness, would rumble from far away, as if the gods were thinking of thundering. In stages of five minutes each, it would draw nearer, and eventually addressed distinctly the student on the other side of the pedestals, a tall English girl named, with a pertness that sat somewhat askew on her mature body, Robin.

  “Here, here,” Seabright said. “We’re not doing silhouettes.”

  “I thought, you know,” Robin replied in an eager voice that to Leonard’s American ears sounded also haughty, “if the outline came right, the rest could be fitted in.”

  “Oh no. Oh no. We don’t fit in; we build across the large form. Otherwise all the little pieces will never read. You see, there, we don’t even know where the center of your chest is. Ah—may I?” From the grunts and sighs Leonard pictured Robin rising from straddling her horse and Seabright seating himself. “Dear me,” he said, “you’ve got the outlines so black they rather take my eye. However …”

  To Leonard it was one of Seabright’s charms that, faced with any problem of drawing, he became so engrossed he forgot to teach. He had had to train himself to keep glancing at his watch; else he would sit the whole afternoon attacking a beginner’s exercise, frowning like a cat at a mouse hole, while the forgotten student stood by on aching legs.

  “There,” Seabright sighed reluctantly. “I’m afraid I’ve spent my time with you. It’s just one passage, but you can see here, across the thorax, how the little elements already are turning the large surface. And then, as you’d pass into the rib cage, with these two shadows just touched in at first, you see … Perhaps I should do a bit more.… There, you see. And then we could pass on to the throat.… It’s a good idea, actually, on these figgers to start with the pit of the throat, and then work the shoulders outwards and go up for the head.…”

  “Yes, sir,” Robin said, a shade impatiently.

  “The whole thrust of the pose is in those angles, you see? Do you see?”

  “Yes, sir, I hope so.”

  But her hopes were not enough for him; he came around the pedestals and his plump, solemn, slightly feline figure was in Leonard’s view when he turned and said apprehensively to the hidden girl, “You understand to use the pencil as lightly as you can? Work up the whole form gradually?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite,” Robin’s pert voice insisted.

  Seabright twitched his head and came and stood behind Leonard. “I don’t think,” he said at last, “we need draw in the casting seams; we can idealize to that extent.”

  “It seemed to help in getting the intervals,” Leonard explained.

  “Even though these are exercises, you know, there’s no advantage in having them, uh, positively ugly.” Leonard glanced around at his teacher, who was not usually sarcastic, and Seabright continued with some embarrassment; his speech impediment was less audible than visible, a fitful effortfulness of the lips. “I must confess you’re not given much help by your subject matter.” His eyes had lifted to the statue Leonard had chosen to draw, for the reason that it had all four limbs. Completeness was the crude token by which Leonard preferred one statue to another; he was puzzled by Seabright’s offended murmur of “Wretched thing.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Look here, Hartz,” Seabright exclaimed, and with startling aggressiveness trotted forward, stretched up on tiptoe, and slapped the plaster giant’s side. “The Roman who copied this didn’t even understand how the side here is constricted by this leg taking the weight!” Seabright himself constricted, then blinked abashedly and returned to Leonard’s side with a more cautious voice. “Nevertheless, you’ve carried out parts of it with admirable intensity. Per, uh, perhaps you’ve been rather too intense; relax a bit at first and aim for the swing of the figger—how that little curve here, you see, sets up against this long lean one.” Leonard expected him to ask for the pencil, but instead he asked, “Why don’t you get yourself a new statue? That charming girl Miss Cox is doing—Diana, really, I suppose she is. At least there you do get some echoes of the Greek grace. I should think you’ve done your duty by this one.”

  “O.K. It was starting to feel like mechanical drawing.” To dramatize his obedience, Leonard began prying out his thumbtacks, but Seabright, his five minutes not used up, lingered.

  “You do see some sense in drawing these at the outset, don’t you?” Seabright was troubled by his American students; of the five, Leonard knew he must seem the least rebellious.

  “Sure. It’s quite challenging, once you get into one.”

  The Englishman was not totally reassured. He hovered apologetically, and confided this anecdote: “Picasso, you know, had a woman come to him for advice about learning to draw, and he told her right off, ‘Dessinez antiques.’ Draw from the antique. There’s nothing like it, for getting the big forms.”

  Then Seabright left, pattering past threatening athletes and emperors, through the archway, out of the section altogether, into the brighter room where medieval armor, spurs, rings, spoons, and chalices were displayed. The sound of his shoes died. From behind the hedge of pedestals, quite close to Leonard’s ear, Robin’s clear voice piped, “Well, isn’t Puss in a snorty mood?”

  To attack the statue Seabright assigned him, Leonard moved his horse several yards forward, without abandoning the precious light that filt
ered through a window high behind him. From this new position Robin was in part visible. A plinth still concealed her bulk, but around the plinth’s corner her propped drawing board showed, and her hand when it stabbed at the paper, and even her whole head, massive with floppy fair hair, when she bent forward into a detail. He was at first too shy to risk meeting her eyes, so her foot, cut off at the ankle and thus isolated in its blue ballet slipper on the shadowy marble floor, received the brunt of his attention. It was a long foot, with the division of the toes just beginning at the rim of the slipper’s blue arc, and the smooth pallor of the exposed oval yielding, above the instep, to the mist-reddened roughness of an Englishwoman’s leg. These national legs, thick at the ankles and glazed up to the knees with a kind of weatherproofing, on Robin were not homely; like a piece of fine pink ceramic her ankle kept taking, in Seabright’s phrase, his eye.

  After an hour Leonard brought out, “Aren’t your feet cold, in just those slippers?”

  “Rather,” she promptly responded and, with the quick skip that proved to be her custom, went beyond the question: “Gives me the shivers all over, being in this rotten place.”

  It was too quick for him. “You mean the school?”

  “Oh, the school’s all right; it’s these wretched antiques.”

  “Don’t you like them? Don’t you find them sort of stable, and timeless?”

  “If these old things are timeless, I’d rather be timely by a long shot.”

  “No, seriously. Think of them as angels.”

  “Seriously my foot. You Americans are never serious. Everything you say’s a variety of joke; honestly, it’s like conversing in a monkey-house.”

  On this severe note Leonard feared they had concluded; but a minute later she showed him his silence was too careful by lucidly announcing, “I have a friend who’s an atheist and hopes World War Three blows everything to bits. He doesn’t care. He’s an atheist.”

  Their subsequent conversations sustained this discouraging quality, of two creatures thrown together in the same language exchanging, across a distance wider than it seemed, miscalculated signals. He felt she quite misjudged his seriousness and would have been astonished to learn how deeply and solidly she had been placed in his heart, affording a fulcrum by which he lifted the great dead mass of his spare time, which now seemed almost lighter than air, a haze of quixotic expectations, imagined murmurs, easy undressings, and tourist delights. He believed he was coming to love England. He went to a tailor and bought for four guineas a typical jacket of stiff green wool, only to discover, before the smeary mirror in his digs, that it made his head look absurdly small, like one berry on top of a bush; and he kept wearing his little zippered khaki windbreaker to the Constable School.

  As an alien, he could not estimate how silly she truly was. She was eighteen, and described looking up as a child and seeing bombs floatingly fall from the belly of a German bomber, yet there was something flat and smooth behind her large eyes that repelled closeness. She seemed to be empty of the ragged, absorbent wisdom of girls at home whose war experiences stopped short at scrap drives. Across Robin’s incongruities—between her name and her body, her experiences and her innocence—was braced a determined erectness of carriage, as if she were Britannia in the cartoons; her contours contained nothing erotic but limned a necessarily female symbol of ancient militance. Robin was tall, and her figure, crossing back and forth through the shadows of the casts and the patchy light between, seemed to Leonard to stalk. She was always in and out now. In at nine-thirty, breathless; out at ten for a coffee break; back at eleven; lunch at eleven-thirty; back by one; at two-thirty, out for a smoke; in by three; gone by four. Since the days of their joint attack on that chaste archer the moon goddess, Robin’s work habits had grown blithe. She had moved away to another area, to analyze another figure, and he had not been bold enough to follow with his horse, though his next statue took him in her direction. So at least once an hour she appeared before his eyes, and, though the coffee breaks and long lunches forced him to deduce a lively native society, he, accustomed by the dragged-out days of Army life to patience, still thought of her as partly his. It seemed natural when, three weeks before the Michaelmas term ended, Puss—Leonard had fallen in with mocking Seabright—promoted them to still life together.

  At the greengrocer’s on Monday morning they purchased still-life ingredients. The Constable School owned a great bin of inanimate objects, from which Leonard had selected an old mortar and pestle. His idea was then to buy, to make a logical picture, some vegetables that could be ground, and to arrange them in a Chardinesque tumble. But what, really, was ground, except nuts? The grocer did have some Jamaican walnuts.

  “Don’t be funny, Leonard,” Robin said. “All those horrid little wrinkles, we’d be at it forever.”

  “Well, what else could you grind?”

  “We’re not going to grind anything; we’re going to paint it. What we want is something smooth.”

  “Oranges, miss?” the lad in charge offered.

  “Oh, oranges. Everyone’s doing oranges—looks like a pack of advertisements for vitamin C. What we want …” Frowning, she surveyed the produce, and Leonard’s heart, plunged in the novel intimacy of shopping with a woman, beat excitedly. “Onions,” Robin declared. “Onions are what we want.”

  “Onions, miss?”

  “Yes, three, and a cabbage.”

  “One cabbage?”

  “Here, may I pick it out?”

  “But, Robin,” Leonard said, having never before called her by name, “onions and cabbages don’t go together.”

  “Really, Leonard, you keep talking as if we’re going to eat them.”

  “They’re both so round.”

  “I dare say. You won’t get me doing any globby squashes. Besides, Leonard, ours won’t get rotten.”

  “Our globby squashes?”

  “Our still life, love. Haven’t you seen Melissa’s pears? Really, if I had to look at those brown spots all day I think I’d go sick.”

  The lad, in his gray apron and muddy boots, gently pushed a paper bag against her arm. “Tenpence, miss. Five for the onions and four for the head and the bag’s a penny.”

  “Here,” Leonard said hoarsely, and the action of handing over the money was so husbandly he blushed.

  Robin asked, “Are the onions attractive?”

  “Oh yes,” the boy said in a level uncomprehending tone that defended him against any intention she might have, including that of “having him on.”

  “Did you give us attractive onions?” she repeated. “I mean, we’re not going to eat them.”

  “Oh yes. They’re good-looking, miss.”

  The boy’s referring to the cabbage simply as “the head” haunted Leonard, and he started as if at a ghost when, emerging with Robin into the narrow street, the head of a passerby looked vividly familiar; it was the handsomely sculpted head alone, for otherwise Jack Fredericks had quite blended in. He was dressed completely in leather and wool, and even the haircut framing his amazed gape of recognition had the heavy British form. Eerie reunions are common among Americans abroad, but Leonard had never before been hailed from this far in the past. It offended him to have his privacy, built during so many painful weeks of loneliness, unceremoniously crashed; yet he was pleased to be discovered with a companion so handsome. “Jack, this is Miss Robin Cox; Robin, Jack Fredericks. Jack is from my home town, Wheeling.”

  “Wheeling, in what state?” the girl asked.

  “West Virginia.” Jack smiled. “It’s rather like your Black Country.”

  “More green than black,” Leonard said.

  Jack guffawed. “Good old literal Len,” he told Robin. His small moist eyes sought in vain to join hers in a joke over their mutual friend. He and Leonard had never been on a “Len” basis. Had they been on the streets of Wheeling, neither one would have stopped walking.

  “What are you doing here?” Leonard asked him.

  “Reading ec at Jesus; but you
’re the one who baffles me. You’re not at the university surely?”

  “Sort of. We’re both at the Constable School of Art. It’s affiliated.”

  “I’ve never heard of it!” Jack laughed out loud, for which Leonard was grateful, since Robin further stiffened.

  She said, “It’s in a wing of the Ash. It’s a very serious place.”

  “Is it really? Well, I must come over sometime and see this remarkable institution. I’m rather interested in painting right now.”

  Leonard said, feeling safe, “Sure. Come on over. Any time. We have to get back now and make a still life out of these onions.”

  “Well, aren’t you full of tricks? You know,” Jack said to the girl, “Len was a year older than I in public school and I’m used to looking up at him.”