Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  My father tried to change the subject. “Well, you won one debate, Allen, and that’s more than I would have done. I don’t see how you do it.”

  “Why, he gets it from you, Victor. I’ve never won a debate with you.”

  “He gets it from Pop Baer. If that man had gone into politics, Lillian, all the misery of his life would have been avoided.”

  “Dad was never a debater. He was a bully. Don’t go with little women, Allen. It puts you too close to the ground.”

  “I’m not going with anybody, Mother. Really, you’re so fanciful.”

  “Why, when she stepped off the train, from the way her chins bounced I thought she had eaten a canary. And then making my poor son, all skin and bones, carry her bag. When she walked by me I honestly was afraid she’d spit in my eye.”

  “I had to carry somebody’s bag. I’m sure she doesn’t know who you are.” Though it was true I had talked a good deal about my family the night before.

  My mother turned away from me. “You see, Victor—he defends her. When I was his age that girl’s mother gave me a cut I’m still bleeding from, and my own son attacks me on behalf of her fat little daughter. I wonder if her mother put her up to catching him.”

  “Molly’s a nice girl,” my father interceded. “She never gave me any trouble in class, like some of those smug bastards.” But he was curiously listless, for so Christian a man, in pronouncing this endorsement.

  I discovered that nobody wanted me to go with Molly Bingaman. My friends—for on the strength of being funny I did have some friends, classmates whose love affairs went on over my head but whom I could accompany, as clown, on communal outings—never talked with me about Molly, and when I brought her to their parties gave the impression of ignoring her, so that I stopped taking her. Teachers at school would smile an odd tight smile when they saw us leaning by her locker or hanging around in the stairways. The eleventh-grade English instructor—one of my “boosters” on the faculty, a man who was always trying to “challenge” me, to “exploit” my “potential”—took me aside and told me how dense she was. She just couldn’t grasp the logical principles of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. He confided her parsing mistakes to me as if they betrayed—as indeed in a way they did—limits that her graceful social manner concealed. Even the Fabers, an ultra-Republican couple who ran a luncheonette near the high school, showed pleasure whenever Molly and I broke up, and persistently treated my attachment as being a witty piece of play, like my pretense with Mr. Faber of being a Communist. The entire town seemed ensnarled in my mother’s myth, that escape was my proper fate. It was as if I were a sport that the ghostly elders of Olinger had segregated from the rest of the livestock and agreed to donate in time to the air; this fitted with the ambiguous sensation I had always had in the town, of being simultaneously flattered and rejected.

  Molly’s parents disapproved because in their eyes my family was déclassé. It was so persistently hammered into me that I was too good for Molly that I scarcely considered the proposition that, by another scale, she was too good for me. Further, Molly herself shielded me. Only once, exasperated by some tedious, condescending confession of mine, did she state that her mother didn’t like me. “Why not?” I asked, genuinely surprised. I admired Mrs. Bingaman—she was beautifully preserved—and I always felt jolly in her house, with its white woodwork and matching furniture and vases of iris posing before polished mirrors.

  “Oh, I don’t know. She thinks you’re flippant.”

  “But that’s not true. Nobody takes himself more seriously than I do.”

  While Molly protected me from the Bingaman side of the ugliness, I conveyed the Dow side more or less directly to her. It infuriated me that nobody allowed me to be proud of her. I kept, in effect, asking her, Why was she stupid in English? Why didn’t she get along with my friends? Why did she look so dumpy and smug?—this last despite the fact that she often, especially in intimate moments, looked beautiful to me. I was especially angry with her because this affair had brought out an ignoble, hysterical, brutal aspect of my mother that I might never have had to see otherwise. I had hoped to keep things secret from her, but even if her intuition had not been relentless, my father, at school, knew everything. Sometimes, indeed, my mother said that she didn’t care if I went with Molly; it was my father who was upset. Like a frantic dog tied by one leg, she snapped in any direction, mouthing ridiculous fancies—such as that Mrs. Bingaman had pushed Molly on me just to keep me from going to college and giving the Dows something to be proud of—that would make us both suddenly start laughing. Laughter in that house that winter had a guilty sound. My grandfather was dying, and lay upstairs singing and coughing and weeping as the mood came to him, and we were too poor to hire a nurse, and too kind and cowardly to send him to a “home.” It was still his house, after all. Any noise he made seemed to slash my mother’s heart, and she was unable to sleep upstairs near him, and waited the nights out on the sofa downstairs. In her desperate state she would say unforgivable things to me even while the tears streamed down her face. I’ve never seen so many tears as I saw that winter.

  Every time I saw my mother cry, it seemed I had to make Molly cry. I developed a skill at it; it came naturally to an only child who had been surrounded all his life by unhappy adults. Even in the heart of intimacy, half naked each of us, I would say something to keep her at a distance. We never made love in the final, coital sense. My reason was a mixture of idealism and superstition; I felt that if I took her virginity she would be mine forever. I depended overmuch on a technicality; she gave herself to me anyway, and I took her anyway, and have her still, for the longer I travel in a direction I could not have travelled with her the more clearly she seems the one person who loved me without advantage. I was a homely, comically ambitious poor boy, and I even refused to tell her I loved her, to pronounce the word “love”—an icy piece of pedantry that shocks me now that I have almost forgotten the pressured context in which it seemed wise.

  In addition to my grandfather’s illness, and my mother’s grief, and my waiting to hear if I had won a scholarship to the one college that seemed good enough for me, I was burdened with managing too many petty affairs of my graduating class. I was in charge of yearbook write-ups, art editor of the school paper, chairman of the Class Gift Committee, director of the Senior Assembly, and teachers’ workhorse. Frightened by my father’s tales of nervous breakdowns he had seen, I kept listening for the sounds of my brain snapping, and the image of that gray, infinitely interconnected mass seemed to extend outward, to become my whole world, one dense organic dungeon, and I felt I had to get out; if I could just get out of this, into June, it would be blue sky, and I would be all right for life.

  One Friday night in spring, after trying for over an hour to write thirty-five affectionate words for the yearbook about a null girl in the Secretarial Course I had never spoken a word to, I heard my grandfather begin coughing upstairs with a sound like dry membrane tearing, and I panicked. I called up the stairs, “Mother! I must go out.”

  “It’s nine o’clock.”

  “I know, but I have to. I’m going crazy.”

  Without waiting to hear her answer or to find a coat, I left the house and backed our old car out of the garage. The weekend before, I had broken up with Molly again. All week I hadn’t spoken to her, though I had seen her once in Faber’s, with a boy in her class, averting her face while I, hanging by the side of the pinball machine, made rude wisecracks in her direction. I didn’t dare go up to her door and knock so late at night; I just parked across the street and watched the lit windows of her house. Through their living-room window I could see one of Mrs. Bingaman’s vases of hothouse iris standing on a white mantel, and my open car window admitted the spring air, which delicately smelled of wet ashes. Molly was probably out on a date with that moron in her class. But then the Bingamans’ door opened, and her figure appeared in the rectangle of light. Her back was toward me, a coat was on her arm, and her mother seem
ed to be shouting. Molly closed the door and ran down off the porch and across the street and quickly got into the car, her eyes downcast. She came. When I have finally forgotten everything else—her powdery fragrance, her lucid cool skin, the way her lower lip was like a curved pillow of two cloths, the dusty red outer and wet pink inner—I’ll still be grieved by this about Molly, that she came to me.

  After I returned her to her house—she told me not to worry, her mother enjoyed shouting—I went to the all-night diner just beyond the Olinger town line and ate three hamburgers, ordering them one at a time, and drank two glasses of milk. It was after one o’clock when I got home, but my mother was still awake. She lay on the sofa in the dark, with the radio sitting on the floor murmuring Dixieland piped up from New Orleans by way of Philadelphia. Radio music was a steady feature of her insomniac life; not only did it help drown out the noise of her father upstairs but she seemed to enjoy it in itself. She would resist my father’s pleas to come to bed by saying that the New Orleans program was not over yet. The radio was an old Philco we had always had; I had once drawn a fish on the orange disc of its celluloid dial, which had looked to my eyes like a fishbowl.

  Her loneliness caught at me; I went into the living room and sat on a chair with my back to the window. For a long time she looked at me tensely out of the darkness. “Well,” she said at last, “how was little hotpants?” The vulgarity this affair had brought out in her language appalled me.

  “I made her cry,” I told her.

  “Why do you torment the girl?”

  “To please you.”

  “It doesn’t please me.”

  “Well, then, stop nagging me.”

  “I’ll stop nagging you if you’ll solemnly tell me you’re willing to marry her.”

  I said nothing to this, and after waiting she went on in a different voice, “Isn’t it funny, that you should show this weakness?”

  “Weakness is a funny way to put it when it’s the only thing that gives me strength.”

  “Does it really, Allen? Well. It may be. I forget, you were born here.”

  Upstairs, close to our heads, my grandfather, in a voice frail but still melodious, began to sing: “There is a happy land, far, far away, where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.” We listened, and his voice broke into coughing, a terrible rending cough growing in fury, struggling to escape, and loud with fear he called my mother’s name. She didn’t stir. His voice grew enormous, a bully’s voice, as he repeated, “Lillian! Lillian!” and I saw my mother’s shape quiver with the force coming down the stairs into her; she was like a dam; and then the power, as my grandfather fell momentarily silent, flowed toward me in the darkness, and I felt intensely angry, and hated that black mass of suffering, even while I realized, with a rapid, light calculation, that I was too weak to withstand it.

  In a dry tone of certainty and dislike—how hard my heart had become!—I told her, “All right. You’ll win this one, Mother; but it’ll be the last one you’ll win.”

  My pang of fright, following this unprecedentedly cold insolence, blotted my senses; the chair ceased to be felt under me, and the walls and furniture of the room fell away—there was only the dim orange glow of the radio dial down below. In a husky voice that seemed to come across a great distance my mother said, with typical melodrama, “Goodbye, Allen.”

  Should Wizard Hit Mommy?

  IN THE EVENINGS and for Saturday naps like today’s, Jack told his daughter Jo a story out of his head. This custom, begun when she was two, was itself now nearly two years old, and his head felt empty. Each new story was a slight variation of a basic tale: a small creature, usually named Roger (Roger Fish, Roger Squirrel, Roger Chipmunk), had some problem and went with it to the wise old owl. The owl told him to go to the wizard, and the wizard performed a magic spell that solved the problem, demanding in payment a number of pennies greater than the number Roger Creature had but in the same breath directing the animal to a place where the extra pennies could be found. Then Roger was so happy he played many games with other creatures, and went home to his mother just in time to hear the train whistle that brought his daddy home from Boston. Jack described their supper, and the story was over. Working his way through this scheme was especially fatiguing on Saturday, because Jo never fell asleep in naps any more, and knowing this made the rite seem futile.

  The little girl (not so little; the bumps her feet made under the covers were halfway down the bed, their big double bed that they let her be in for naps and when she was sick) had at last arranged herself, and from the way her fat face deep in the pillow shone in the sunlight sifting through the drawn shades, it did not seem fantastic that something magic would occur, and she would take her nap as she used to. Her brother, Bobby, was two, and already asleep with his bottle. Jack asked, “Who shall the story be about today?”

  “Roger …” Jo squeezed her eyes shut and smiled to be thinking she was thinking. Her eyes opened, her mother’s blue. “Skunk,” she said firmly.

  A new animal; they must talk about skunks at nursery school. Having a fresh hero momentarily stirred Jack to creative enthusiasm. “All right,” he said. “Once upon a time, in the deep dark woods, there was a tiny little creature name of Roger Skunk. And he smelled very bad—”

  “Yes,” Jo said.

  “He smelled so bad none of the other little woodland creatures would play with him.” Jo looked at him solemnly; she hadn’t foreseen this. “Whenever he would go out to play,” Jack continued with zest, remembering certain trials of his own childhood, “all of the other tiny animals would cry, ‘Uh-oh, here comes Roger Stinky Skunk,’ and they would run away, and Roger Skunk would stand there all alone, and two little round tears would fall from his eyes.” The corners of Jo’s mouth drooped down and her lower lip bent forward as Jack traced with a forefinger along the side of her nose the course of one of Roger Skunk’s tears.

  “Won’t he see the owl?” she asked in a high and faintly roughened voice.

  Sitting on the bed beside her, Jack felt the covers tug as her legs switched tensely. He was pleased with this moment—he was telling her something true, something she must know—and had no wish to hurry on. But downstairs a chair scraped, and he realized he must get down to help Claire paint the living-room woodwork.

  “Well, he walked along very sadly and came to a very big tree, and in the tiptop of the tree was an enormous wise old owl.”

  “Good.”

  “ ‘Mr. Owl,’ Roger Skunk said, ‘all the other little animals run away from me because I smell so bad.’ ‘So you do,’ the owl said. ‘Very, very bad.’ ‘What can I do?’ Roger Skunk said, and he cried very hard.”

  “The wizard, the wizard,” Jo shouted, and sat right up, and a Little Golden Book spilled from the bed.

  “Now, Jo. Daddy’s telling the story. Do you want to tell Daddy the story?”

  “No. You me.”

  “Then lie down and be sleepy.”

  Her head relapsed onto the pillow and she said, “Out of your head.”

  “Well. The owl thought and thought. At last he said, ‘Why don’t you go see the wizard?’ ”

  “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “Are magic spells real?” This was a new phase, just this last month, a reality phase. When he told her that spiders eat bugs, she turned to her mother and asked, “Do they really?” and when Claire told her that God was in the sky and all around them, she turned to her father and insisted, with a sly yet eager smile, “Is He really?”

  “They’re real in stories,” Jack answered curtly. She had made him miss a beat in the narrative. “The owl said, ‘Go through the dark woods, under the apple trees, into the swamp, over the crick—’ ”

  “What’s a crick?”

  “A little river. ‘Over the crick, and there will be the wizard’s house.’ And that’s the way Roger Skunk went, and pretty soon he came to a little white house, and he rapped on the door.” Jack rapped on the windowsill, and under the cover
s Jo’s long body clenched in babyish delight. “And then,” Jack went on, “a tiny little old man came out, with a long white beard and a pointed blue hat, and said, ‘Eh? Whatzis? Whatcher want? You smell awful.’ ” The wizard’s voice was one of Jack’s own favorite effects; he did it by scrunching up his face and somehow whining through his eyes, which felt for the interval rheumy. He felt being an old man suited him.

  “ ‘I know it,’ Roger Skunk said, ‘and all the little animals run away from me. The enormous wise owl said you could help me.’

  “ ‘Eh? Well, maybe. Come on in. Don’t git too close.’ Now, inside, Jo, there were all these magic things, all jumbled together in a big dusty heap, because the wizard did not have any cleaning lady.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because he was a wizard, and a very old man.”

  “Will he die?”

  “No. Wizards don’t die. They just get more and more cranky. Well, he rummaged around and found an old stick called a magic wand and asked Roger Skunk what he wanted to smell like. Roger thought and thought and said, ‘Roses.’ ”

  “Yes. Good,” Jo said smugly.

  Jack fixed her with a trancelike gaze and chanted in the wizard’s elderly irritable voice:

  “ ‘Abracadabry, hocus-poo,

  Roger Skunk, how do you do,

  Roses, boses, pull an ear,

  Roger Skunk, you never fear:

  Bingo!’ ”

  He paused as a rapt expression widened out from his daughter’s nostril wings, forcing her eyebrows up and her lower lip down in an expression of mute exclamation, an expression in which Jack was startled to recognize his wife feigning pleasure at cocktail parties. “And all of a sudden,” he whispered, “the whole inside of the wizard’s house was full of the smell of—roses! ‘Roses!’ Roger Fish cried. And the wizard said, very cranky, ‘That’ll be seven pennies.’ ”

  “Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “Roger Skunk. You said Roger Fish.”