The Afterlife: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  “Vivian dear, you’re being quite amazingly stupid. He wasn’t a Nazi, he was a poet, a fin-de-siècle dandy. You don’t know the details of it, and I don’t, either. When we get back home, I’ll do some research.”

  “If you ever mention this hideous man to me again, I’ll ask for a divorce.”

  He winced a smile, here in the sun. “You think the judge will find it sufficient grounds?”

  She would not smile back. “Think of it—real men in those boxes, their bones. Hideous male bonding, right through to the afterlife.”

  “I don’t know, isn’t there a kind of innocent pomp to it? I find it rather touching.”

  “As touching as what you did to Claire.”

  Claire had been his second wife. Allenson blinked, and said, “What we did to Claire, you could say.”

  “Men, I mean,” Vivian pleaded, desperately gesturing upward, out of the depths of a millennial oppression. “Putting themselves in pompous marble boxes, ruining all this woodland, the lovely view. Oh, I hate it. I can’t stand you standing there smirking and loving it.”

  “I don’t exactly love—” But his wife, with an angrily shut face, from which tears were trying to escape, dodged past him and through the shadows of the motionless memorials—the Thirteen basking in their indecipherable glory—as if through a maze, and ran down the stairs, where the portly family was with difficulty ascending, to get their cinque mila’s worth.

  Maybe a baby would calm her down, Allenson thought. She was approaching the age of now or never, as far as pregnancy was concerned. But the concept of one more dependent, its little life sticking out past his into the future like a diving board, made him dizzy.

  Vivian was waiting for him at a landing lower down, leaning against a stone balustrade. “Sorry,” she said. “I lost it.” In the cooling sunlight he saw that she, like a real Italian beauty, had a few fine dark hairs on her upper lip.

  This vulnerable touch softened him. “You’re right, of course. There is something creepy about this place.”

  “There’s still more. There’s a whole navy down there, the sign says.”

  “Nave,” Allenson read. “A ship. How can there be a ship?”

  But there was one, with a mast and cabin and funnels, breasting the treetops, below them. A kind of gigantic centaur, its back half a deck imitated in stone, the foredeck apparently real, and all the tons of it heroically dragged up the hillside to rest incongruously among the poplars and the ink-dark cypresses. It would have helped his marriage, he knew, to forgo this wonder, but the boy in him couldn’t resist heading down the steps, and setting foot on the marble deck, and then the wooden deck, and looking over the rail at the ocean of trees, the poplar leaves flickering like tiny whitecaps. Returning up the stairs, he was short of breath, and his legs felt heavy. “It’s a toy,” he told Vivian. “It’s all toys.”

  “Just like war,” she said.

  “Oh, come on,” he begged. “I didn’t build it. I’m just an American tourist, like you.” Imitating a dutiful husband, he escorted her down, past the closed mansion with its Art Deco doors, past the red roadster used in the mysterious impresa, out of this maze with its dead Minotaur. Yet, at the entrance, he couldn’t resist asking, “Want to buy any souvenirs?”

  “Drop dead,” she suggested, and walked away from him toward the car. He bought five postcards, including one showing D’Annunzio nel suo studio (dans son bureau, in his study, in seinem Studierzimmer) wearing a three-piece fuzzy gray suit, a handkerchief in his pocket, a stickpin in his cravat, the veins in his very bald head bulging with concentration, his little lips pursed. He looked sickly. A rich life was catching up with him. Now his body was back there, pressed against the sky, dry as a flattened lizard.

  Vivian stood far down the narrow sidewalk toward the parking lot. Ignominiously, in her furious sulk, she had had to wait beside the Fiat, since he had the keys. “That was fun,” he told her. “Just as well the house and museum were closed, they might have been too much.”

  “I’d rather have fun at Auschwitz,” she said.

  “Cut it out. O.K., the guy had a good self-image. That’s no crime. That doesn’t mean Auschwitz. The fucking trouble with your generation, all you know about history is Auschwitz and the A-bomb, and all you know about politics is you don’t want them to happen again. Oh dear, no, anything but that! I keep telling you, he was on our side. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “Maybe you’ve got the wrong girl. You had a wife just like you, why didn’t you stick with her? Claire would have loved going to Nazi shrines.”

  “She might have,” he admitted. Claire had been game, and never quarrelsome. Silence had been her weapon, and a serene, blameless inner absence.

  Vivian persisted, her dark eyes flashing. “You want a new woman. Claire and I were a set, we went together. Wife, mistress. I bet you’ve already got her picked out. It was somebody you saw in Venice. You began to act funny in Venice.” Female intuition, he thought, what a nuisance it is. The possibility of yet another woman secretly thrilled him, but the practicalities of it were overwhelming.

  “Vivian, please. I’m nearly sixty. I’m ready for my sarcophagus. As my prospective widow, I hope you paid close attention up there. It’s just what I want. Only you can leave out those thirteen other guys.”

  She grudgingly laughed, beginning to let the sore spot heal. Back on the main road, she said, “Look, George, there’s an aperto.”

  He slowed and pulled into the gas station. “How did you say we say, ‘Fill ’er up’?”

  “Il pieno, per favore. That’s what the guidebook says.”

  But no one came out of the little office, and no other cars were at the pumps. Allenson got out into the sun and shrugged at Vivian through her window. “Chiuso,” he said.

  Another car pulled in, and a small Italian woman in black got out, and looked around. Allenson caught her eye. “Chiuso?” he said again, with a more tentative intonation. She favored him with a stream of Italian and did not seem disappointed when his face showed total incomprehension.

  Allenson had noticed, beyond the empty office, a boy in gray jeans and a Shell T-shirt washing a car, with an air of independence of this establishment. But now he came over and spoke to the woman, and showed her something about the pump. She smiled in sudden eager understanding, performed some action Allenson could not see, seized the handle of the gasoline pump, pumped, and drove away.

  The boy approached Allenson. “Is automatique,” he said. “Ten-thousand-lira note, then pump.”

  “Ah, comprendo, comprendo. Molto grazie.” He explained to Vivian, “You deal with the pump directly. You feed it lire.” He found the right denomination of bill in his wallet, and with a curt mechanical purr the slot sucked it in. Gasoline then flowed from the nozzle into his tank, rather briefly. Ten thousand lire—nine dollars—bought just a few liters.

  “More!” she shouted from within the Fiat. “Here’s more mon-ey!” She pushed ten-thousand-lira notes out through her half-open window, and the pump avidly sucked them up, turning money into movement, into married romance.

  When he got back behind the wheel, Vivian, momentarily satisfied, said, “It’s strange he had to explain it to the woman, too. She was Italian.”

  “It’s a tough country,” George Allenson pronounced, from his height of experience. “Even the natives can’t figure it out.”

  II. Bluebeard in Ireland

  “Yes, the people are wonderful,” George Allenson had to agree, there in Kenmare. His wife, Vivian, was twenty years younger than he, but almost as tall, with dark hair and decided, sharp features, and it placed the least strain on their marriage if he agreed with her assertions. Yet he harbored an inner doubt. If the Irish were so wonderful, why was Ireland such a sad and empty country? Vivian, a full generation removed from him, was an instinctive feminist, but to him any history of unrelieved victimization seemed suspect. Not that it wasn’t astonishing to see the eighty-room palaces the British landlords had built for th
emselves, and touching to see the ruins—stone end walls still standing, thatched roofs collapsed—of the hovels where the Irish had lived, eaten their potatoes and drunk their whiskey, and died. Vivian loved the hovels, inexplicably; they all looked alike from the outside, and, when it was possible to enter a doorless doorway or peek through a sashless window-hole, the inside showed a muddy dirt floor, a clutter of rotting boards that might once have been furniture, and a few plastic or aluminum leavings of intruders like themselves.

  Vivian could see he was unconvinced. “The way they use the language,” she insisted, “and leave little children to run their shops for them.”

  “Wonderful,” he agreed again. He was sitting with his, he hoped, not ridiculously much younger wife in the lounge of their hotel, before a flickering blue fire that was either a gas imitation of a peat fire or the real thing, Allenson wasn’t sure. A glass of whiskey whose one ice cube had melted away added to his natural sleepiness. He had driven them around the Dingle Peninsula today in a foggy rain, and then south to Kenmare over a narrow mountain road from Killarney, Vivian screaming with anxiety all the way, and it had left him exhausted. After a vacation in Italy two years ago, he had vowed never to rent a foreign car with her again, but he had, in a place with narrower roads and left-handed drive. During the trickiest stretch today, over fabled Moll’s Gap, with a Mercedes full of gesturing Germans pushing him from behind, Vivian had twisted in her seat and pressed her face against the headrest rather than look, and sobbed and called him a sadistic fiend.

  Afterwards, safely delivered to the hotel parking lot, she complained that she had twisted so violently her lower back hurt. What he resented most about her attacks of hysteria was how, when she recovered from them, she expected him to have recovered, too. For all her feminism she still claimed the feminine right to meaningless storms of emotion, followed by the automatic sunshine of male forgiveness.

  As if sensing the sulky residue of a grudge within him, and determined to erase it, she flashed there by the sluggish fire an impeccable smile. Her lips were long and mobile but thin and sharp, as if—it seemed to him in his drowsy condition, by the gassy flickering fire—her eyebrows had been duplicated and sewn together at the ends to make a mouth. “Remember,” she said, offering to make a memory of what had occurred mere hours ago, “the lady shopkeeper out there beyond Dingle, where I begged you to stop?”

  “You insisted I stop,” he corrected. She had said that if he didn’t admit he was lost she would jump out of the car and walk back. How could they be lost, he had argued, with the sea on their left and hills on their right? But the sea was obscured by fog and the stony hills vanished upward into rain clouds and she was not persuaded; at last he had slammed on the brakes. Both of them had flounced out of the car. The dim-lit store looked empty, and they had been about to turn away from the door when a shadow materialized within, beyond the lace curtains—the proprietress, emerging from a room where she lived, waiting, rocking perhaps, watching what meagre channels of television reached this remoteness. He had been surprised, in southwestern Ireland, by how little television there was to watch, and by the sound of Gaelic being spoken all about him, in shops and pubs, by the young as well as the old. It was part of his own provincialism to be surprised by the provincialism of others; he expected America, its language and all its channels, to be everywhere by now.

  This was indeed a store; its shadowy shelves held goods in cans and polyethylene packets, and a cloudy case held candies and newspapers bearing today’s date. But it was hard for the Allensons to see it as anything but a stage cleverly set for their entrance and exit. The village around them seemed deserted. The proprietress—her hair knotted straight back, her straight figure clad in a dress of nunnish gray—felt younger than she looked, like an actress tricked out in bifocals and a gray wig, and she described the local turnings as if in all her years on a cliff above the sea she had never before been asked to direct a pair of tourists. There was a grave ceremoniousness to the occasion that chastened the fractious couple. To pay her for her trouble, they bought a copy of the local newspaper and some bags of candy. In Ireland, they had reverted to candy, which they ate in the car—Licorice Allsorts for him, for her chocolate-covered malt balls called Maltesers.

  They had got back into the car enhanced by the encounter, the irritating currents between them momentarily quelled. Yet, even so, for all those theatrically precise directions, Allenson must have taken a wrong turning, for they never passed the Gallarus Oratory, which he had wanted to see. It was the Chartres of beehive chapels. In Ireland, the sights were mostly stones. Allenson found himself driving endlessly upward on the north side of the Dingle Peninsula, and needing to traverse the Slieve Mish Mountains to avoid Tralee, and being tailgated by the Germans on Moll’s Gap, while Vivian had hysterics and he reflected upon the gaps between people, even those consecrated to intimacy.

  He had had three wives. He had meant Vivian to see him into the grave, but unexpected resistances in her were stimulating, rather than lulling, his will to live. In his simple and innocent manhood he had taken on a swarming host of sexist resentments—men were incompetent (his driving in foreign lands), men were ridiculous (his desire to see, faute de mieux, old Ireland’s lichened gray beehive huts, dolmens, menhirs, and ruined abbeys), men were lethal. Two years ago, out of sheer political superstition, this youthful wife had become furious in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s estate above Lake Garda, all because the world-renowned poet and adventurer had enshrined himself and his thirteen loyal followers in matching sarcophagi, lifted up to the sun on pillars. Men were Fascists, this had led Vivian to realize. She proved to be violently allergic to history, and her silver-haired husband loomed to her as history’s bearer. So he had, for their next trip abroad, suggested Eire, a land whose history was muffled in legend and ignominy. Just its shape on the map, next to Great Britain’s spiky upstanding silhouette, suggested the huddled roundness of a docile spouse.

  “You insisted,” he repeated, “and then we got lost anyway, and saw none of the sights. I missed the Gallarus Oratory.”

  Vivian brushed his resentful memory away, there by the hotel fire. “The whole countryside is the sight,” she said, “and the wonderful people. Everybody knows that. And all day, with you jerking that poor Japanese compact this way and that like a crazy teenaged hood, I couldn’t enjoy looking out. If I take my eye off the map for an instant, you get us lost. You’re not getting me back into that car tomorrow, I tell you that.”

  Itching to give the fire a poke, he gave it to her instead. “Darling, I thought we were going to drive south, to Bantry and Skibbereen. Bantry House in the morning, and Creagh Gardens in the afternoon, with a quick lunch at Ballydehob.” Allenson smiled.

  “You’re a monster,” Vivian said cheerfully. “You really would put me through a whole day of you at the wheel on these awful roads? We’re going to walk.”

  “Walk?”

  “George, I talked it over with a man in the office, the assistant manager, while you were putting on a shirt and tie. He couldn’t have been sweeter, and said what the tourists do in Kenmare is they take walks. He gave me a map.”

  “A map?” Another whiskey would sink him to the bottom of the sea. But would that be so bad? This woman was a talking nightmare. She had produced a little map, printed by photocopy on green paper, showing a pattern of numbered lines surrounding the phallic thrust of the Kenmare estuary. “I’ve come all this way to take a walk?” But there was no arguing. Vivian was so irrational that, because her predecessor wife had been called Claire, she had refused, planning the trip, to include County Clare, where the good cliffs and primitive churches were, and off whose shore part of the Spanish Armada had wrecked.

  Next morning, the devil in him, prompted by the guidebook, could not resist teasing her. “Today’s the day,” he announced, “to drive the Ring of Beara. We can see the Ogham Stone at Ballycrovane, and if there’s time take the cable car to Dursey Island, the only such wonder in this green an
d wondrous land. The blessed roadway meanders, it says here, through mountainous coastal areas providing panoramic views of both Bantry and Kenmare bays. A famous stone circle there is, and just two miles further, the ruins of Puxley’s mansion! A mere hundred and forty kilometers, the entire ring is claimed to be; that’s eighty-eight miles of purest pleasure, not counting the cable car.”

  “You must be out of your gourd,” Vivian said, using one of those youthful slang expressions that she knew he detested. “I’m not getting back into any car with you at the wheel until we head to Shannon Airport. If then.”

  Allenson shrugged to hide his hurt. “Well, we could walk downtown to the local circle again. I’m not sure I grasped all the nuances the first time.”

  It had been charming, in a way. They had driven up a little cul-de-sac at the shabbier end of Kenmare and a small girl in a school jumper had been pushed from a house, while her mother and siblings watched from the window, and shyly asked for the fifty-pence admission. Then through a swinging gate and up a muddy lane the couple had walked, past stacks of roof tiles and a ditch brimming with plastic trash, arriving at a small mown plateau where fifteen mismatched stones in a rough circle held their mute pattern. He had paced among them, trying to unearth in his atavistic heart the meaning of these pre-Celtic stones. Sacrifice. This must have been, at certain moments of heavenly alignment, a place of sacrifice, he thought, turning to see Vivian standing at the ring’s center in too vividly blue a raincoat.

  “We’re walking,” she agreed with him, “but not back to those awful rocks that got you so excited, I’ll never know why. It’s stupid to keep looking at rocks somebody could have arranged yesterday for all we know. There are more of these supposedly prehistoric beehive huts today than there were a hundred years ago, the nice young man in the office was telling me yesterday. He says what sensible people who come to Kenmare do is take long walks.”