The Afterlife: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  Paul came in a minute later, looking so tall he seemed stretched by a transcendent pull from the ceiling. His pale face and lank woman’s-length hair were damp with the exertions of vicarious labor. He stabbed at Richard’s chest with a recklessly extended hand, and, when Richard took it, said in his soulful troubadour manner, “Your dear, brave daughter has given birth to Richard Leo Wysocki.”

  It was one of those prepared sentences, like Armstrong’s when setting foot on the moon, that came out stilted and hard to understand. They had named his grandson after him. Paul and Judith must have planned this ahead of time, in the event that it was a boy. “My God. You didn’t have to do that,” Richard said, he feared ungraciously.

  Visiting hours were long over. Out of sight, medical procedures had closed protectively around the mother and baby. Paul would stay, to see his wife settled into her room, but he gave the grandparent-figures permission to go. “The Super Bowl is still tied,” Richard protested.

  Andy said curtly, “It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. Joan and I are leaving.”

  Richard had to admire how carefully Andy wrapped his gray wool scarf around his neck, holding it in place with his chin while he inch by inch shrugged his overcoat up to his shoulders. Joan reached out as if to help her husband, and then, sensing Richard’s watching, suppressed the wifely gesture. “Don’t forget your book,” she told Andy instead. “And your Wall Street Journal.”

  Paul said, “Mr. Maple, we’ll be moving Jude”—he called Judith “Jude,” as in “Hey Jude,” rather than Jude the Obscure—“in here, but if you wanted to finish watching the Super Bowl I bet it’s on in the lobby downstairs. I don’t think they want you to stay on this floor.” Already, he seemed more mature, and slightly stooped.

  “That’s fine, Paul—the party’s over. I’ll go with the other old folks. Tell Judith I’ll try to swing by tomorrow morning, before I head back to Boston. Think that would be O.K.?”

  “Visiting hours don’t begin until one, but I would think, sure,” Paul answered—rather grudgingly, Richard felt. He tailed the Vanderhavens out through the hospital corridors. Joan had acquired a mink coat since her marriage to him; its glinting collar set off becomingly her lightly bouncing hair, with its elusive texture between frizzy and wavy. Her hair was tightly curly elsewhere, and in the Sixties she had managed a pretty good Afro, for a white woman. On the other side of the glass hospital doors, the dark civic vacancy of Hartford brimmed with sheer cold. No one else moved on the streets; Richard’s eyes and nostrils stung, and within a minute the tips of his thumbs were aching in their thin leather gloves. Across the street, the hospital parking garage glowed with an aquarium dimness, and the booth where the man took the tickets was empty. To the striped cross-bar was attached a sign that in large red letters stated that the garage closed at nine-thirty.

  “Oh, damn!” Andy cried, and stamped his foot on the snow-muffled asphalt. Both Richard and Joan laughed aloud, the gesture was so petulant and ineffective. Their laughter rang in the brittle cold as if off the rafters of a deserted church. Andy asked, “Why didn’t anybody tell us?”

  “I bet they thought you could read,” Richard said. “It’s probably printed right on the ticket.”

  Joan said, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s my fault. I was just so excited about becoming a grandmother I wasn’t noticing anything.”

  “And I don’t see any taxis anywhere,” Andy said. “Damn, damn!” He wore an astrakhan hat that made him look like a toy soldier, and every sentence from his mouth was a streaming white flag.

  “Where are you?” Richard asked Joan.

  “I think it’s called the Morgan. It’s the only decent hotel downtown.”

  That sounded more like Andy than the egalitarian Joan he had known. He said, “Don’t despair. I’ll take you in my car, and you can take a taxi back here in the morning.”

  “That’d be lovely,” she said, swinging her body to keep warm, so that her coat shimmered in the faint street light. “Where are you?”

  “Good question. I parked on the street, but I was so excited I didn’t really think where. I remember I had to walk slightly uphill.” He headed down the nearest slant of sidewalk, beside Joan in her mink, while Andy tailed behind them. The street came quickly to a dead end, next to what seemed to be a boiler plant, a windowless brick building housing a muffled roaring of heat, and again Richard had to laugh. Joan did, too.

  Andy whined, “Let me go back to the hospital and have them phone for a cab.”

  “Don’t be such a sissy. Think of yourself as a West African explorer,” Richard said. His face was blazing in the cold and his thumbs in his thin gloves were quite numb. “It has to be around here somewhere. A gray Taurus, with three bridge stickers on the windshield. I remember noticing a row of boarded-up shops and wondering if kids looking for drugs were going to smash my windows.”

  “Great,” Andy said. “Come on, Joan, let’s head back. This is a mugger’s paradise.”

  “Nonsense,” Joan pronounced. “Everybody’s too cold to mug.” She was still a liberal at heart. She turned and said, “Richard, think. What kind of shops? Did you cross any big streets? From what angle did you approach the hospital?”

  Her hopeful voice, which he had first heard in a seminar on English-language epics—a dozen callow male faces around an oaken conference table, and hers, shining—summoned up in him a younger, student self. Ruth was so much more decisive and clear-headed than he that he rarely had to think. A grid began to build in his mind. “One street over,” he said, pointing, “and then, I think, left.” Joan led the way, he and Andy numbly following; she was the friskiest of the three, perhaps because she had the warmest coat. They had not walked ten minutes before he recognized his car—its three stickers, its pattern of road-salt stains. It had not been broken into. The shops he vaguely remembered were on the other side of the street, oddly. He was pleased to hear the door lock click; he had known it to freeze in weather warmer than this.

  Joan got into the back, letting Andy have the seat by the heater. The engine started, and as the car rolled along the silent, glazed streets, she put her face up between the two men’s shoulders, talking to Richard. “The baby. When they come out—I’ve never seen this described—they have an expression on their faces, a funny little bunchy look of distaste. He looked just like Judith when we’d try to give her prunes. Then there’s a gush of water, and the rest of the baby slips out like nothing, trailing this enormous spiralled umbilical cord, all purply and yellow.”

  “Joanie, please,” Andy said, readjusting his muffler.

  She went on, inspired, to Richard, “I mean, the apparatus. You think of the womb as a kind of place for transients, but it’s a whole other life in there. It’s a lot to give up.” He understood what she meant; as always, she was groping for the big picture, searching for the hidden secret, in keeping with all those sermons she had had to sit through as a child. Life is a lesson, a text with a moral.

  Whereas Andy listened to her as one does to second wives, in confidence that the search is over. Or that there is no search. He patted her hand, where it rested in its mink sleeve next to his shoulders. “I shouldn’t have let you watch,” he said. “It’s going to give you bad dreams.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she said, a bit indignantly, Richard felt.

  “Tell me one more thing,” he begged. “Who the hell is Leo?”

  “His father—didn’t you know? They’re not like we were—this may be their only child, or male child at least, and they had to load him up.”

  Andy told Richard, “Go right up there, and then you have to go left—it’s a one-way street. You can let us off at the corner and we’ll walk up to the entrance.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll circle the block and let you off right under the marquee. Right under the damn doorman’s nose.”

  Joan’s hand touched his shoulder. “When you see Judith tomorrow morning, give my love. We’re going to hurry right back
in the morning, Andy has a meeting at ten.”

  Richard thought of kissing her good night, but their faces were probably still icy, and his neck didn’t turn as easily as it used to.

  His room at the Best Inn was on the ground floor, its wall-to-wall shag carpeting laid over concrete poured right on grade. The walls seemed subterranean, breathing out a deep freeze, their surface cold to the touch. The baseboard heating was ticking but unequal to its task. Richard hadn’t thought to throw pajamas in with tomorrow’s fresh shirt; he shivered in his underwear between the clammy sheets, got up, robbed the other twin bed of its skimpy blanket and bedspread, and finally draped his overcoat on top of himself. Still, the cold pressed in upon him from the walls like a force that wanted to compress his existence to nothing, that wanted to erase this temporary blot of heated, pumping blood. It’s a lot to give up, Joan had said of the womb, and indeed the cosmic volume of lightless, warmthless space hostile to us is overwhelming. He felt, huddled up, like a homunculus frigidly burning at the far end of God’s indifferently held telescope. He was a newly hatched grandfather, and the universe wanted to crush him, to make room for newcomers. He did fall asleep, a little, and his dreams, usually so rich in suppressed longing and forgotten knowledge, were wispy, as if starved by his body’s effort to maintain body temperature.

  In the morning, checking out, groggy and still chilled, at the front desk, he complained of the lack of heat; the youthful clerk, fresh arrived from a cozy bed elsewhere, shrugged in scant apology and said, “We don’t get a night like last night very often. Four below, on my mom’s porch.”

  By daylight the hospital looked different: more bustling, yet more shabby and temporary, a factory of healing staffed by weary people working half in the dark. A Hartford Courant Richard bought with his tea—no more coffee, he vowed; keep that blood pressure down—said that his team of bronze-helmeted heroes had lost in the last thirty seconds, to a forty-seven-yard field goal. Miracles are cheap.

  When, at last, against the strict rules, they let him in to see his daughter, Judith looked unexpectedly neutral after her ordeal—neither drained nor jubilant, sick nor well, older nor younger than her age of thirty-one. She was wearing a hospital johnny under Joan’s old powder-blue bathrobe, and sitting on the edge of the bed. She had been feeding the baby, and the nurses had taken him back to the nursery. “I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “It was a little weird. They put this thing in my arms this morning and it’s like I had no idea what to do with it. I hardly even knew which end was up. I was afraid I’d drop it and felt very, you know, awkward.”

  He sat down in the big leather chair Andy had taken last night and smiled paternally. “You’ll stop feeling awkward very quickly.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Paul says.” Paul, the know-it-all. From just the way in which Judith pronounced his name, he had won an undeserved promotion. Richard found himself more jealous and resentful of Paul and the baby than of Andy. Judith said, “He’s a great father already.”

  “Maybe it’s an easier role. There isn’t all that—that apparatus. Maybe you’re still feeling the baby is part of yourself, like a foot. I mean, how much feeling can you work up right off the bat toward a foot? How did the actual—what’s the word—birthing go?”

  Judith from infancy on had been a sturdy, independent sort, a little opaque in her feelings, with something of her mother’s detached honesty. “Good,” she said. “It was good. Paul was great, with the breathing. At one point he began to sing, and got all the nurses laughing. But they were wrong about the Lamaze method. It hurt. They kept saying it was just pressure, but it hurt, Dad.”

  Warmth swarmed to his eyes, at the thought of his daughter in pain. He blinked and stood and kissed her lightly on her forehead, that wide pale brow that from the start, love her as much as he could, held behind it her secrets, her sensations, her identity. “I should go. The nurses want to do something to you.”

  “Look at him around the corner. See who you think he looks like. Mom thinks he looks like Grandpa, the way his mouth has a little pinch in the middle, and turns down at the ends.”

  “Sounds like Andy’s mouth to me. You don’t suppose he’s the real grandfather, do you?”

  It took Judith a moment to put it together and to realize that her father was being ironical. She was as groggy as he was; he had been compressed in the night, and she had been split in two. He told her, “Your mother by the way said to give her love. Andy was rushing her back to Boston bright and early, as soon as they could spring their car from the garage, where it got trapped last night.”

  “She told me all about it. She was in, she and Andy, right after breakfast. She talked him into it, I guess.”

  Richard laughed. “It’s going to be hard to keep up with your mother, in the grandparenting business.”

  “Yeah. You should see her hold the baby. She knew which end was up.”

  To him, too, it seemed clear, when a nurse brought his grandson to the window, that this reddish grapefruit, with its frowning closed eyes and its few licks of silky hair, pale like its father’s, was a human head, and that the tiny lavender appendages on the other, unswaddled end were toes. “Want to hold him?” the nurse, who was young and black, asked him through the glass.

  “Do I dare?”

  “You’re the grandpap, aren’t you? Grandpaps are special people around here.”

  And the child’s miniature body did adhere to his chest and arms, though more weakly than the infants he had presumed to call his own. Nobody belongs to us, except in memory.

  to TREVOR LEONARD UPDIKE

  and KAI DANIELS FREYLEUE

  newcomers to this life

  Books by John Updike

  POEMS

  The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)

  NOVELS

  The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

  SHORT STORIES

  The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)

  ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011)

  PLAY MEMOIRS

  Buchanan Dying (1974) Self-Consciousness (1989)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)

  John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the A
merican Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.