The Afterlife: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  “Joan says Judith wants her there. If she wants Joan she must want me. If I let Joan go down there alone with Andy, the baby will think Andy’s the grandfather. The kid will get—what’s the word?—imprinted.”

  Ruth said, “Nobody, not even an hour-old infant, could ever think Andy Vanderhaven is one of your family. You’re all ragamuffins, and Andy’s a fop.” Richard had long ago grown used to Ruth’s crisp way of seeing things; it was like living in a pop-up book, with no dimension of ambiguity.

  But the thought of letting his first grandchild enter the world without him near at hand was painful. Judith had been born in England, and had been tightly swaddled when he first saw her—a compact package with a round red face. She was the first baby he had ever held; he had thought it would be a precarious experience, shot through with fear of dropping something so precious and fragile, but no, in even the smallest infant there was an adhesive force, a something that actively fit your arms and hands, banishing the fear. The hot wobbly head, the wandering eyes like opaque drops of celestial liquid, the squinting little face choleric and muscular with the will to live. We’re in this together, Dad, the baby’s body had assured him, and we’ll both get through it.

  And they had, through diapers and midnight feedings, colic and measles, adolescent tears and fits of silliness, flute lessons and ski lessons, grade school and high school, until at last, ceremoniously attending an entertainment by the graduating seniors, Richard had been startled by how his daughter, one of a leggy troupe of leotarded dancers, had in synchrony with the others struck a conclusive pose and stared unsmiling out at the audience. All their eyebrows were raised inquisitively. They were asking, What are we? And the answer, from the silently stunned audience, had become: Women. Richard had never before quite so distinctly seen his daughter as a body out in the world, competing, detached from his own. And now her body was splitting, giving birth to another, and he’d be damned if he’d let Joan be there having their grandbaby all to herself.

  Driving down Route 86 into the blinding splinters of a sunset, he heard the disc jockey crow, “Get your long johns out of the mothballs, Nutmeg Staters, we’re going to flirt with zero tonight!” It had been a dry January so far, but what little snow had fallen had not melted, because of the cold; tonight was to be a record-setter. The station played country music. Hartford had always struck him as a pleasantly hick city, a small forest of green-glass skyscrapers on the winding road to New York; when you descended out of the spaghetti of overpasses, there was a touching emptiness, of deserted after-hours streets and of a state capital’s grandiose vacancies. It was a city with nobody in it, just a few flitting shadows, and some heaps of plowed snow. The hospital complex included a parking garage, but he circled the inner-city blocks until he found a free meter. Not yet six o’clock, it was quite dark. Richard hurried through the iron air to the bright lights of the warm hospital spaces. He was the last of this particular extended family to arrive, and the least. A receptionist and her computer directed him to the correct floor, and after he had sat in the waiting room long enough to skim the cream from two issues of Sports Illustrated, Joan hurried out to him from some deeper, more intimate chamber of the maternity wing like a harried hostess determined to make every guest, however inconsequential, feel welcome.

  She had put on weight with her contentment as Mrs. Vanderhaven—Andy evidently didn’t impose the slimming stress of her first marriage—and wore a beltless yellow dress, with small flowers, that seemed old-fashioned, a back-to-nature dress from the Sixties. Her face, broader than he remembered it, was rosy with the event overtaking her—she was becoming a grandmother—and the tropical warmth of the hospital air. “We didn’t know if you’d be coming or not,” she explained.

  “I said I would,” Richard protested, mildly.

  “We didn’t know if Ruth would let you.”

  “How would she stop me? She thought it was a terrific idea. ‘Give them all my love,’ she said.”

  Joan shot him a quick, blue-eyed glance, uncertain, as she often had been, of how ironical he was being. She seemed in the years since they were married to have lost her eyelashes, and her hair had turned gray above her wide brow. Factually she said, “They broke the waters an hour ago, and now we’re just sitting around waiting for the contractions to take hold. Judy is in good spirits, though a little apprehensive.” This last description seemed to fit Joan as well; she was shy with him. Their telephone conversations, which on the excuse of the children had persisted long into their second marriages, had dwindled these last years; months of silence between them went by now, and he did not know when he had last been as alone with her as he was in this hotly lit waiting room, with its rows of plastic chairs in alternating colors and its yammering television set up near the ceiling. It was the Sunday of the Super Bowl, and the announcers were revving up; even the female members of the news teams were supposed to be excited. Joan had been bending over awkwardly, to look him in the face, with her hands braced on her thighs, and now, perhaps in response to a pang in her back, she suddenly sat down, in the plastic chair next to his. His chair was dirty cream in color, hers scuffed orange. The molded shapes were for narrow people, and Richard and Joan had to edge away to avoid touching rumps.

  “Who wouldn’t be apprehensive?” he asked. “And who is ‘we’?” He had taken off his overcoat but was still wearing a tweed sports jacket, and uncomfortably felt the heat of her proximate body.

  But Joan seemed to be rapidly relaxing. “Oh,” she said, “Paul, and Paul’s sister—she’s a nurse, as you know, but not at this hospital, but they let her come sit with us, in the pre-delivery room—and Andy and me. And of course Judy and the little stranger.”

  “Some crowd,” he said. “How’s Paul acting?”

  His son-in-law, whose blond hair was already thinning in front, wore a pony tail, and had always seemed to Richard insolently tall, as if he had just drawn himself up a few extra inches in a kind of full-body sneer. Richard had never quite known what the word “weedy” meant, applied to a person, but Paul Wysocki had helped him to understand. A weedy person was a tall dry stalk you wanted to pull up and throw away. Richard was surprised the marriage had lasted five years. “Wonderfully,” Joan said, with defensive emphasis. “Very tender with Judy, and very confident. He didn’t miss a single birthing class, you know, and is all set to breathe with her. He brought her favorite book of poems, E. E. Cummings, to read to her as a distraction if she needs it.”

  “How do you read E. E. Cummings aloud? All those staggered letters and open spaces.”

  “We heard him himself do it, don’t you remember? The year he gave the Norton Lectures.”

  Cummings had been a small, quite bald man in a tuxedo, very precise in manner, reading everything—Wordsworth, Dante, his own prose and poetry—in a fluting voice that never faltered or slipped, up there on the cavernous stage of Sanders Theatre. Richard and Joan had stood together in line in the Cambridge winter to get into the theatre, whose vast neo-Gothic space was murmurous and steaming with student excitement. For an instant he and this plump elderly woman beside him had become a pair of worn binoculars focused on that animated bright-headed homunculus lodged deep in the transparent mass of lost time. He was jointly and privately theirs, fluting Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, stanza after stanza, while the student audience around them grew restless, wadded in place with hundreds of overcoats.

  Joan went away, promising she’d be back. She did not invite him to join the crowd around Judith, nor did he want to. He took the elevator down to the cafeteria, to have a cup of coffee and a lemon Danish. Something about hospital cafeterias freed him from all dietary restraints. If it was bad for you, they wouldn’t be selling it. He called Ruth, collect. “Well, I’m here, honey. Nothing much is happening yet.”

  He liked calling his wife, because her voice over the phone had a throaty, shapely quality he didn’t easily hear when they were face to face; it was a young voice, the voice of their old courtship—secretive
, urgent, humid. Yet what she said was typically crisp: “Well, of course not. Whoever said anything would happen? You could be stuck there for days. Where are you staying?”

  Richard smiled; she always asked that, as if his staying in any hotel or motel without her were a kind of infidelity. “At a Best Inn just off 84. I thought I should grab a room before I came here. It’s going to be record cold tonight. Is it zero yet in Boston?”

  “How would I know? I was watching Sixty Minutes—a fascinating exposé of the pharmaceutical companies, and now I’ve missed the conclusion, thanks to you. Mike Wallace was being absolutely relentless with some wishy-washy Squibb CEO.”

  “I don’t think, once they induce, it takes days.”

  “Well, I never thought I’d wind up a grass widow while my husband runs around watching his children have children. How is Joan? As darling as ever?”

  “I only saw her a minute. They’re all in some other room timing Judy’s contractions, and I’m outside in the waiting room reading old Smithsonians.”

  “How unfair,” Ruth said, and it sounded as though she was, at last, touched.

  “No, Joan understands. I don’t need to be in the same room with that willowy Pole.”

  “But you love Judith so.”

  “All the more reason, not to get her distracted.”

  After hanging up, he went back into the cafeteria and bought an Almond Joy. He hadn’t had one for years. He had returned for less than a minute to his perusal of outdated magazines when Joan came back. “Where were you? Judy’s pace has picked up and she’s gone into the labor room.” His former wife’s cheeks bore a hectic, spotty flush; with her wiggly gray hair and waistless figure she was looking like one of those art-loving Cambridge ladies Cummings had written about sardonically but who had shown up at his reading anyway, decades ago, among the hot-bodied undergraduates. “The doctor says Paul and I can stay with her, but not Andy. Andy hates waiting rooms, he thinks they’re full of germs, and the nurses said why not wait in Judy’s room? It has a television set. We thought maybe you’d like to go in there, too.” Joan looked slightly alarmed at the idea, as if her two husbands hadn’t known each other for years, through thick and thin. “Judy’s worried about you sitting out here alone.”

  “Well, we don’t want to worry Judy, do we? Sure, why not?” Richard said, and let her lead him down the corridor. Her hair looked less gray from behind, and bounced as it used to when she would wheel her bicycle ahead of him along the diagonal walks of Harvard Yard.

  Andy was sitting in the room’s one leather chair, reading a prim little book from the Oxford University Press, with a sewn-in bookmark. He was wearing gold half-glasses and looked up like a skeptical schoolmaster. Richard told him, “Keep reading, Andy. I’ll just cower over here in the corner.” Joan hovered uneasily, her hands held out from her body as if she were in a chain dance with invisible partners.

  “Dick,” she said, pointing, “there’s a chair that looks at least half comfortable.”

  Andy looked up over his glasses again. “Would you like the chair I’m sitting in, Richard? It’s all one to me.”

  “Absolutely not, Andy. Survival of the fittest. To the victor belong the spoils, or something. What’s that cute little book you’re reading? The Book of Common Prayer?”

  It amused him that Joan, a clergyman’s daughter to whom the concept of God seemed not only dim but oppressive, had married such a keen churchman. Andy was an Episcopalian the way a Chinese mandarin was a Confucian, to keep his ancestors happy. He showed Richard the little anthology’s jacket: West African Explorers. “But astonishing,” he said, “the faith some of these poor devils had. They were all walking straight into malaria, of course.”

  “You two will be all right, then?” Joan asked.

  Her husband didn’t respond, so Richard took it upon himself to reassure her. “Happy as clams. Let us know when the baby comes or dinner is served, whichever comes first.”

  After listening to Andy turn pages and sniff for a while, and staring out the window at a paved, snow-dusted space crossed now and then by a human shadow hunched against the cold, he asked the other man, “Mind if I turn on the TV? We’re missing some great commercials.”

  “That football game? You watch such things?”

  “The Super Bowl, I generally do. Andy, how can you call yourself an American and not watch the Super Bowl?”

  “I don’t call myself an American,” Andy said, and sniffed, “very often.”

  Richard laughed. This was fun, he had decided. If he were at home, Ruth would have him watching Nature on PBS.

  One team wore white helmets, and the other helmets were bronze in color. One quarterback threw passes like darts, neat and diagrammatic, and the other kept scrambling out of his crumbling pocket of protection to toss high wobbling balls, butterflies up for grabs. “What a catch!” Richard cried out. “Did you see that, Andy? One-handed, six inches off the Astroturf!”

  “No, I didn’t see it.”

  “It was a miracle,” Richard assured him. “A once-in-a-lifetime miracle. There—you can see it on replay!”

  Joan kept checking on them every half-hour or so. On one trip, she brought them doughnuts, and on another, Styrofoam bowls of chicken-noodle soup on a tray of nubbly recycled cardboard. “The cafeteria is closing,” she explained.

  “Crackers, did you remember crackers for me?” Richard asked.

  “Salt and starch, Dicky boy,” Andy said. “You still eat that crap?”

  Joan blushed. “As a matter of fact, I did,” she said to her former husband, and produced two packets of saltines from a pocket of her shapeless dress with its little yellow flowers. “I wasn’t going to give them to you unless you asked.”

  Andy explained to him, “Already, there’s enough sodium in this canned soup to add five points to your blood pressure.”

  “Go! Go!” Richard yelled at the screen, where a running back, his bronze helmet lowered, his brown calves pumping, was driving three tacklers backward to gain the yard needed for a first down.

  Andy eventually stopped trying to read his book, and put on his distance glasses, the better to follow his ad-hoc roommate’s football commentary. Richard found himself wildly partisan for the bronze helmets—the more Eastern of the two teams, and the one with the scrambling quarterback and some butter-fingered ends. They were down by ten points at the half. The half-time show seemed very long and overpopulated and was based on nostalgia for a brand of Seventies rock that both men had been too old to appreciate the first time around. Richard went out and found a vending machine and brought back four dollars’ worth of candy bars and snacks in little waxed-paper bags. Andy ate a few cheese curls, wiping his fingers on his handkerchief afterwards. Joan came in, her eyes the electric blue they used to be after a bath, and told them, “They’re coming faster now.” The contractions.

  “How many points is that?” Andy asked when the bronze-helmeted quarterback was sacked behind his own goal line.

  “Just two. Last chance at the cheese curls.”

  “No thanks. All yours.”

  “How about a strawberry-flavored Twizzler?”

  “God, no.”

  Richard wondered if Andy was this fastidious in bed. Perhaps that was what Joan had needed—a man to draw her out, to make her feel relatively liberated. “No matter where I go,” she had once complained to Richard, not only of their sex, “you’re there ahead of me.”

  “Wow,” Andy said, of a long, fluttering pass that found the receiver’s fingertips, and stayed in his grip despite a lethal blind-side hit.

  “That seems to be the name of the game now,” Richard explained. “Trying to strip the ball. It’s amazing, what passes for legal with the pros. Watch what happens after the tackle.” For how long, he wondered, had Joan and Andy been sleeping together before he had known? Saying she needed interests outside the home, she had joined the Episcopal choir, and would come back from Thursday-night rehearsals later and later, creeping between the she
ets with a stealthy rustle as loud as a thunderclap. Even if he was asleep, her sudden warm body, with its cold toes and beery breath, would waken him. Andy sang bass, though you would have taken him for a tenor.

  “Survival of the fittest,” Andy said now, smiling to himself.

  A quick slant, another fluttering pass completed, a brilliant cut-back through a hole opened for a nanosecond by an all-pro offensive tackle, and then that big fullback tucking his head down and writhing over the goal line: the Eastern underdogs were back in the game. An interception early in the fourth quarter, by a lineman who almost lumbered off in the wrong direction, and the score was tied. Andy, who was well into it by now, cheered, and Richard offered him a palm-up hand for a slapped five. “My goodness,” Joan said, once more entering the room. “Sorry to interrupt the fun, guys, but I have news.”

  “No!” Richard said, suddenly terrified, as when sometimes in the movie theater a vast pit of reality and eventual death opened underneath him, showing the flickering adventure on the screen to be a mere idle distraction from his life, a waste of minutes while his final minute was rapidly approaching.

  “Yes,” Joan said, complacently.

  “What sex?”

  “Paul wants to give you the particulars himself.”

  “What a tease she is, huh, Andy? Tell me at least the weight.”

  “Big. The whole process was big—amazing, seeing it from that side. The afterbirth!” Her eyes rolled up, picturing it; then she gave her nervous clergyman’s-daughter laugh, to recall herself from so intimate a sharing, and said sharply to her present husband, “Andy, you must be starving.”