by John Updike
I asked him how old he was. He was twenty-two, and was being trained as an airplane mechanic. He wanted at the end of his hitch to come back to Salem and live. He figured an airplane mechanic could find some sort of job. I told him, with a paternal firmness that amazed my ears, to marry her; absolutely; his parents would get used to it. The thing about parents, I told him, was that secretly, no matter what you did, they liked you anyway. I told him I had married at the age of twenty-one and had never been sorry.
He asked me, “What do you do? Teach?”
This impressed me. My grandfather had been a teacher, and my father was a teacher, and from my childhood up it had been assumed by people that I in turn would become a teacher.
“No,” I said. “I’m a writer.”
He seemed less offended than puzzled. “What do you write?”
“Oh—whatever comes into my head.”
“What’s the point?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I wish I did. Maybe there are several points.”
We talked less freely after that. At his request I left him off in wet twilight at a Texaco station near the entrance of the New Jersey Turnpike. He hoped to get a ride from there all the way to Washington. Other sailors were clustered out of the rain in the doorways of the station. They hailed him as if they had been waiting for him, and as he went to them he became, from the back, just one more sailor, anonymous, at sea. He did not turn and wave goodbye. I felt I had frightened him, which I regretted, because he had driven for me very well and I wanted him to marry his girl. In the dark I drove down the pike alone. In the first years of my car, when we lived in Manhattan, it would creep up to seventy-five on this wide black stretch without our noticing; now the needle found its natural level at sixty. The windshield wipers beat, and the wonderland lights of the Newark refineries were swollen and broken like bubbles by the raindrops on the side windows. For a dozen seconds a cross of blinking stars was suspended in the upper part of the windshield: an airplane above me was coming in to land.
I did not eat until I was on Pennsylvania soil. The Howard Johnsons in Pennsylvania are cleaner, less crowded, more homelike in their furnishings. The decorative plants seem to be honestly growing, and the waitresses have just a day ago removed the Mennonite cap from their hair, which is still pulled into a smooth bun flattering to their pallid, sly faces. They served me with that swift grace that comes in a region where food is still one of the pleasures. The familiar and subtle irony of their smiles wakened in me that old sense, of Pennsylvania knowingness—of knowing, that is, that the truth is good. They were the innkeeper’s daughters, God had given us crops, and my wagon was hitched outside.
When I returned to the car, the music on the radio had changed color. The ersatz hiccup and gravel of Atlantic Seaboard hillbilly had turned, inland, backwards into something younger. As I passed the Valley Forge intersection the radio played a Benny Goodman quintet that used to make my scalp freeze. The speedometer went up to seventy without effort.
I left the toll road for our local highway and, slowing to turn into our dirt road, I was nearly rammed from behind by a pair of headlights that had been pushing, Pennsylvania style, six feet behind me. I parked beside my father’s car in front of the barn. My mother came unseen into the yard, and, two voices calling in the opaque drizzle, while the dogs yapped deliriously in their pen, we debated whether I should move my car farther off the road. “Out of harm’s way,” my grandfather would have said. Complaining, I obeyed her. My mother turned as I carried my suitcase down the path of sandstone steppingstones, and led me to the back door as if I would not know the way. So it was not until we were inside the house that I could kiss her in greeting. She poured us two glasses of wine. Wine had a ceremonial significance in our family; we drank it seldom. My mother seemed cheerful, even silly, and it took an hour for the willed good cheer to ebb away. She turned her head and looked delicately at the rug, and the side of her neck reddened as she told me, “Daddy says he’s lost all his faith.”
“Oh, my.” Since I had also lost mine, I could find nothing else to say. I remembered, in the silence, a conversation I had had with my father during a vacation from college. With the habitual simplicity of his eagerness to know, he had asked me, “Have you ever had any doubts of the existence of a Divine Being?”
“Sure,” I had answered.
“I never have,” he said. “It’s beyond my ability to imagine it. The divinity of Jesus, yes; but the existence of a Divine Being, never.” He stated this not as an attempt to influence me, but as a moderately curious fact he had that moment discovered about himself.
“He never was much one for faith,” my mother added, hurt by my failure to speak. “He was strictly a works man.”
I slept badly; I missed my wife’s body, that weight of memory, beside me. I was enough of a father to feel lost out of my nest of little rustling souls. I kept looking out of the windows. The three red lights of the chimneys of the plant that had been built some miles away, to mine low-grade iron ore, seemed to be advancing over our neighbor’s ridged field toward our farm. My mother had mistaken me for a stoic like my father and had not put enough blankets on the bed. I found an old overcoat of his and arranged it over me; its collar scratched my chin. I tipped into sleep and awoke. The morning was sharply sunny; sheep hustled, heads toppling, through the gauzy blue sky. It was authentic spring in Pennsylvania. Some of the grass in the lawn had already grown shiny and lank. A yellow crocus had popped up beside the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign my father had had an art student at the high school make for him.
I insisted we drive to Alton in my car, and then was sorry, for it seemed to insult their own. Just a few months ago my father had traded in on yet one more second-hand car: now he owned a ’53 Dodge. But while growing up I had been ambushed by so many mishaps in my father’s cars that I insisted we take the car I could trust. Or perhaps it was that I did not wish to take my father’s place behind the wheel of his car. My father’s place was between me and Heaven; I was afraid of being placed adjacent to that far sky. First we visited his doctor. Our old doctor, a man who believed that people simply “wore out” and nothing could be done about it, had several years ago himself worn out and died. The new doctor’s office, in the center of the city, was furnished with a certain raw sophistication. Rippling music leaked from the walls, which were hung with semi-professional oils. He himself was a wiry and firm-tongued young man not much older than myself but venerable with competence and witnessed pain. Such are the brisk shepherds who hop us over the final stile. He brought down from the top of a filing cabinet a plaster model of the human heart. “Your own heart,” he told me, “is nice and thin like this; but your dad’s heart is enlarged. We believe the obstruction is here, in one of these little vessels on the outside, luckily for your dad.”
Outside, in the streets of Alton, my own heart felt enlarged. A white sun warmed the neat façades of painted brick; chimneys red like peony shoots thrust through budding treetops. Having grown accustomed to the cramped, improvised cities of New England, I was impressed, like a tourist, by Alton’s straight broad streets and handsome institutions. While my mother went off to buy my daughter a birthday present—April was nearly upon us—I returned a book she had borrowed from the Alton Public Library. I had forgotten the deep aroma of that place, mixed of dust and cleaning fluid and binder’s glue and pastry baking in the bakery next door. Revisiting the shelf of P. G. Wodehouse that I had once read straight through, I took down Mulliner Nights and looked in the back for the stamped date, in ’47 or ’48, that would be me. I never thought to look for the section of the shelves where my own few books would be placed. They were not me. They were my children, touchy and self-willed.
In driving to the hospital on Alton’s outskirts, we passed the museum grounds, where every tree and flower-bed wore a name-tag and black swans drifted through flotillas of crumbled bread. As a child I had believed literally that bread cast upon the waters came back doubled. Within the museum the
re were mummies with lips snarling back from their teeth in astonishment; a tiny gilt chair for a baby pharaoh; an elephant tusk carved into hundreds of tiny Chinamen and pagodas and squat leafy trees; miniature Eskimo villages that you lit up with a switch and peeped into like an Easter egg; cases of arrowheads; rooms of stuffed birds; and, upstairs, dower chests decorated with hearts and unicorns and tulips by the pious “plain people,” and iridescent glassware from the kilns of Baron von Steigel, and slashing paintings of Pennsylvania woodland by the Shearer brothers, and bronze statuettes of wrestling Indians that stirred my first erotic dreams, and, in the round skylit room at the head of the marble stairs, a black-rimmed pool in whose center a naked green girl held to her pursed lips a shell whose transparent contents forever spilled from the other side, filling this whole vast upstairs—from whose Palladian windows the swans in their bready pond could be seen trailing fan-shaped wakes—with the trickle and splatter of falling water. The world then seemed to me an intricate wonder displayed for my delight with no price asked. Visible above the trees across the pond were rose glints of the hospital, an orderly multitude of tall brick rectangles set among levelled and well-tended grounds, an ideal city of the ill.
I had forgotten how grand the Alton hospital was. I had not seen its stately entrance, approached down a grassy mall, since, at the age of eight, I had left the hospital unburdened of my tonsils. Then, too, it had been spring, and the mall was bright with the first flush of green, and my mother was with me. I recalled it to her, and she said, “I felt so guilty. You were so sick.”
“Really? I remember it as so pleasant.” They had put a cup of pink rubber over my nose and there had been a thunderous flood of the smell of cotton candy and I opened my eyes and my mother was reading a magazine beside my bed.
“You were such a hopeful good boy,” my mother said, and I did not look at her face for fear of seeing her crying.
I wondered aloud if a certain girl in my high-school class was still a nurse here.
“Oh, dear,” my mother said. “Here I thought you came all this way to see your poor old father and all you care about is seeing—” And she used the girl’s maiden name, though the girl had been married as long as I had.
Within the hospital, she surprised me by knowing the way. Usually, wherever we went, it was my father or I who knew the way. As I followed her through the linoleum maze, my mother’s shoulders seemed already to have received the responsible shawl of widowhood. Like the halls of a palace, the hospital corridors were lined with petitioners, waiting for a verdict. Negro girls electrically dramatic in their starched white uniforms folded bales of cotton sheets; gray men pushed wrung mops. We went past an exit sign, down a stairway, into a realm where gaunt convalescents in bathrobes shuffled in and out of doorways. I saw my father diagonally through a doorway before we entered his room. He was sitting up in bed, supported sultanlike by a wealth of pillows and clad in red-striped pajamas.
I had never seen him in pajamas before; a great man for the shortest distance between two points, he slept in his underclothes. But, having been at last captured in pajamas, like a big-hearted lion he did not try to minimize his subdual, but lay fully exposed, without a sheet covering even his feet. Bare, they looked pale, thin-skinned, and oddly unused.
Except for a sullen lymphatic glow under his cheeks, his face was totally familiar. I had been afraid that his loss of faith would show, like the altered shape of his mouth after he had had all his teeth pulled. With grins we exchanged the shy handshake that my going off to college had forced upon us. I sat on the windowsill by his bed, my mother took the chair at the foot of the bed, and my father’s roommate, a fortyish man flat on his back with a ruptured disc, sighed and blew smoke toward the ceiling and tried, I suppose, not to hear us. Our conversation, though things were radically changed, followed old patterns. Quite quickly the talk shifted from him to me. “I don’t know how you do it, David,” he said. “I couldn’t do what you’re doing if you paid me a million dollars a day.” Embarrassed and flattered, as usual, I tried to shush him, and he disobediently turned to his roommate and called loudly, “I don’t know where the kid gets his ideas. Not from his old man, I know that. I never gave the poor kid an idea in my life.”
“Sure you did,” I said softly, trying to take pressure off the man with the hurting back. “You taught me two things. One, always butter bread toward the edges because enough gets in the middle anyway; and, two, no matter what happens to you, it’ll be a new experience.”
To my dismay, this seemed to make him melancholy. “That’s right, David,” he said. “No matter what happens to you, it’ll be a new experience. The only thing that worries me is that she“—he pointed at my mother—”will crack up the car. I don’t want anything to happen to your mother.”
“The car, you mean,” my mother said, and to me she added, “It’s a sin, the way he worships that car.”
My father didn’t deny it. “Jesus, I love that car,” he said. “It’s the first car I’ve ever owned that didn’t go bad on me. Remember all those heaps we used to ride back and forth in?”
The old Chevy was always getting dirt in the fuel pump and refusing to start. Once, going down Firetown Hill, the left front wheel had broken off the axle; my father wrestled with the steering wheel while the tires screamed and the white posts of the guard fence floated toward my eyes. When the car slid sideways to a stop just short of the embankment, my father’s face was stunned and the corners of his mouth dribbled saliva. I was surprised; it had not occurred to me to be frightened. The ’36 Buick had drunk oil, a quart every fifty miles, and liked to have flat tires after midnight, when I would be sailing home with a scrubbed brain and the smell of lipstick in my nose. Once, when we had both gone into town and I had dropped him off and taken the car, I had absent-mindedly driven home alone. I came in the door and my mother said, “Why, where’s your father?”
My stomach sank. “My Lord,” I said, “I forgot I had him!”
As, smiling, I took in breath and prepared to dip with him into reminiscence of these adventures, my father, staring stonily into the air above his pale and motionless toes, said, “I love this place. There are a lot of wonderful gentlemen in here. The only thing that worries me is that Mother will crack up the car.”
My mother was leaning forward pink-faced in the chair at the foot of the bed, trying to smile. He glanced at her and said to me, “It’s a funny feeling. The night before we went to see the doctor, I woke up and couldn’t get my breath and realized I wasn’t ready to die. I had always thought I would be. It’s a funny feeling.”
“Luckily for your dad,” “all his faith,” “wonderful gentlemen”: these phrases were borne in on me, and my tongue seemed pressed flat on the floor of its grave. The pajama stripes under my eyes stirred and streamed, real blood. I wanted to speak, to say how I still needed him and to beg him not to leave me, but there were no words, no form of words available in our tradition. A pillar of smoke poured upward from the sighing man in the other bed.
Into this pit hesitantly walked a plain, painfully clean girl with a pad and pencil. She had yellow hair, thick lips, and, behind pink-rimmed glasses, large eyes that looked as if they had been corrected from being crossed. They flicked across our faces and focused straight ahead in that tunnel-vision gaze of those who know perfectly well they are figures of fun; the Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to the door wear that guarded expression. She approached the bed where my father lay barefoot and, suppressing a stammer, explained that she was from Lutheran Home Missions and that they kept accounts of all hospitalized Lutherans and notified the appropriate pastors to make visitations. Perhaps she had measured my father for a rebuff. Perhaps her eyes, more practiced in this respect than mine, spotted the external signs of loss of faith that I couldn’t see. At any rate my father was a Lutheran by adoption; he had been born and raised a Presbyterian and still looked like one.
“That’s awfully nice of you,” he told the girl. “I don’t see how you pe
ople do it on the little money we give you.”
Puzzled, she dimpled and moved ahead with her routine. “Your church is—?”
He told her, pronouncing every syllable meticulously and consulting my mother and me as to whether the word “Evangelical” figured in the official title.
“That would make your pastor Reverend—”
“Yeah. He’ll be in, don’t worry about it. Wild horses couldn’t keep him away. Nothing he likes better than to get out of the sticks and drive into Alton. I didn’t mean to confuse you a minute ago; what I meant was, just last week in church council we were talking about you people. We couldn’t figure out how you do anything on the little money we give you. After we’ve got done feeding the furnace and converting the benighted Hindu there isn’t anything left over for you people that are trying to help the poor devils in our own back yard.”
The grinning girl was lost in this onslaught of praise and clung to the shreds of her routine. “In the meantime,” she recited, “here is a pamphlet you might like to read.”
My father took it from her with a swooping gesture so expansive I got down from the windowsill to restrain him physically, if necessary. That he must lie still was my one lever, my one certainty about his situation. “That’s awfully nice of you,” he told the girl. “I don’t know where the hell you get the money to print these things.”