Villages

by John Updike

  From this same side of the house, beyond the lot, early on another morning, Owen heard the sound of a shot. He had been sleeping. He seemed to awake in the moment before hearing, as if in a dream, the noise that had awoken him. He had seen enough gangster movies to know the sound of gunpowder under percussion, but in the movies it came in machinegun waves, whereas this was a single, lonely sound.

  His parents heard it, too, for they stirred in their bedroom, beyond his closed door, and the two voices, male and female, intertwined and then fell silent again. It was not quite dark outside; the trees in the side yard had silhouettes, their masses welling into that wash of gray light, with a faint tan tinge to the sky, before birds began to twitter. The street was silent, devoid of traffic, even a farm wagon. Later, he heard a siren, and later still the news, reported at breakfast by his father, who had been up the street news-gathering, that a young man in the Hoffmans’ household, two doors up from the house next to the vacant lot, had shot himself, with a service revolver, a Colt .38, that Wes Hoffman had kept from his time in the Great War. Danny Hoffman was not yet twenty, but a child under his supervision at a summer camp had dived into shallow water and broken his neck, and his responsibility had haunted him, though it had happened a summer ago. Danny had never been the same; he had stayed in the house listening to the radio serials and had stopped looking for a job.

  That explained that. In a dozen years of Depression and World War II, from 1933 to 1945, it was the most dramatic event in Owen’s neighborhood. The woman across the street, Mrs. Yost, had a five-star flag in her front window, but all five soldier-sons came back in fine fettle. Skip Potteiger got Mary Lou Brumbach next door pregnant when she was only seventeen but then he married her so it was all right—by D-Day the baby was in a carriage that Mary Lou pushed back and forth on her way to the Acme, over the shallow troughs that carried roof water out to the gutter and the sidewalk squares that the roots of the horse-chestnut trees were tilting up, tripping you if you were on roller skates. On hot summer evenings the sounds of family quarrels would come across the street from the screened windows of the crowded row houses on the other side, the high side, up cement steps in the retaining walls that leaned outward precariously. But there were no divorces, as Owen remembered things. Voices were raised and shouts and door-slams cut through the neighborhood, but divorces happened elsewhere, in Hollywood and New York, and were tragic scandals, producing what nobody and certainly no child wanted: a broken home. The very phrase had a sinful, terrible sound and the ashen taste of disaster, like the bombed and smoking houses that filled the Fox Movietone newsreels at the Scheherazade, the local movie theatre. The world was full of destruction and evil, and only the United States, it seemed, could put it right. The country was at war, and in Owen’s fantasy the vacant lot in view of his bedroom was a bomb crater, overgrown with weeds.

  The original willow tree still lived, coddled like an old dignitary with injections of pesticide and fertilizer thrust into its roots by making holes with a crowbar; it survived from the time when there had been a paper mill with a water wheel, and a pond stocked with trout, and a dirt racetrack, with harness races, before a grid of streets was laid out on the level low land north of the Pike. Owen’s house—not his house, really, and not even his parents’; it belonged to his mother’s parents, Isaac and Anna Rausch—was one of the older and bigger along Mifflin Avenue, bought by his grandfather when he felt rich from growing leaf tobacco in the First World War. He sold his farm and moved ten miles to this newly fashionable borough of Willow. Then, with the Depression, his savings melted away and his daughter and her husband and child moved in. One couple had a house, the other had some earning ability. Owen’s father was an accountant for one of the knitting mills in Alton. Owen’s auburn-haired, then-slender mother sold draperies in an Alton department store until her little boy pricked her conscience by running after her down Mifflin Avenue, sobbing, as she was on her way to catch the trolley car; she quit the job to spend more time with him. His father, Floyd Mackenzie, came from Maryland. Owen had been named after a sickly grandfather who had died before he was born, but who, by the family’s legendary accounts, had had a twinkle, a sprightliness and inventiveness of mind, they thought of as Scots. He owned a hardware store in Mt. Airy, this original Owen, and in his spare time had invented things, improvements on the implements he sold—a weed-extractor a person could operate without bending over, a hedge-trimmer geared to make the crank turn much easier—but no company had ever taken up their manufacture and made him rich. He died bankrupt and tubercular. Yet a glimmer of his hopes of outwitting the hard world descended to his grandson. The Mackenzies were not rich but were clever, canny. Owen’s father told him, “You take after my old man. You have his intellectual curiosity. He liked to sit and figure out how things worked. Me, I never wondered about anything except where my next dollar was coming from.” Daddy said this somewhat mournfully, as if the Mackenzie heritage was a mixed blessing—a hopeful imagination mixed with a certain frailty of constitution and essential ignorance of the way the world worked as it ground away day by day and picked your pockets.

  His other grandfather, whom Owen lived with, had also a touch of the dreamer, selling his farm and investing in stocks that became worthless. He was a Pennsylvania German, but of an adaptable strain, speaking English perfectly, reading the afternoon newspaper faithfully, ornamenting his idleness with large thoughts and stately pronouncements. Owen recognized in the old man, with his yellowish mustache and white hair and gracefully gesturing hands, the wistfulness of the partial outsider, who had not quite found his way to the sources of power, the decisive secrets, in the only environment he knew.

  “Pop should have been a politician, he has the gift of gab,” his son-in-law would say; but even Owen could see that his grandfather was too fastidious for politics, too passive-minded as he moved through his day, from the back yard, where he hoed and weeded a vegetable garden and could smoke a cigar, to his upstairs bedroom, where he took a nap, to the caneback sofa in the living room, where he sat waiting for Grammy to prepare the evening meal. His house was in Willow but, except for its lone child and Grammy, not quite of it. Grammy was a Yoder, the youngest of ten siblings, a member of a populous clan spread throughout the county. Willow was full of her relatives, cousins and nieces and nephews; sometimes she earned spare money by helping one of them with a big spring housecleaning, or helping prepare and serve a meal for a large gathering. These relatives had money: they owned small businesses or had good positions in the hosiery mills, wore nice clothes, and took vacations in the Poconos or along the Jersey Shore. When Owen heard them speak fondly of “Aunt Annie,” in that slow-spoken sentimental vein that country people once so easily slipped into, he at first had trouble realizing that they meant Grammy. We are different people, he realized, to different people.

  After Owen had left it behind, his original village seemed an innocent, precious place, but it did not strike him as that while he lived there. It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon. There were snakes in the grass and in piles of rocks warmed by the sun. Sex and religion had distinct, ancient odors; families perched like shaky nests on tangled twigs of previous history; and death could pounce in the middle of the night. In the period of young Danny Hoffman’s suicide, when Owen was still a child sleeping beneath a shelf holding two dozen Big Little Books, a one-eyed teddy bear called Bruno, and a rubber Mickey Mouse with a bare black chest and yellow shoes, a big horse-barn on the edge of Willow—the Blake farm, the property of absentee rich people from Delaware—burned down, and his father, who chased after disasters like a boy, reported how the horses, led to safety outside, in their terror bolted back inside, and how terrible the stench of their burning flesh and horsehair was. In the sky from Owen’s window that night, an orange glow silhouetted the roof and chimneys of the house next to the vacant lot, and the tallest spruces and hemlocks in people’s back yards beyond. The town fire sirens blasted again and
again, enormous angry cries to which no answer came. As on the morning of the gunshot, Owen had rolled over and gone back to sleep, letting the world’s torrents of pain wash over him.

  ii. Village Sex—I

  Killing yourself was the ultimate sin, the Bible said, according to Owen’s Sunday-school teachers; especially strict on this and other scores was pale-faced, iron-haired Mr. Dickinson, who managed the bank. Killing yourself was worse than killing a man in self-defense, which was what the Yost boys were doing overseas. It was as if, on quiet Mifflin Avenue, where the milk wagons still made the early morning ring with the lazy sound of horseshoes on asphalt, a crater had opened up next to Owen’s bedroom, a crater of dreadful possibility, a denial of everything, of trees and birds and blue sky and the blessed rest of Nature. Buddy Rourke’s father had fallen into that crater, but he hadn’t intended to, or perhaps—it wasn’t clear, and Buddy didn’t want to talk about it—the father was still alive, but living somewhere else, with another family. He had, the word was, “strayed.”

  There was another kind of sin, also dizzying. On the back wall of the Willow playground-equipment shed, a child’s red crayon had scribbled two penises (the proper word was), their tips touching. Close by, an older, more knowing hand had incised in a pencil that gouged its lines deep into the yellow-painted wood what looked like a swollen letter M but, on examination, was a naked woman, legs bent at the knee and spread to reveal between them a slit, a pumpkin-seed shape, curls of hair around and above it, and below it a dot that Owen could not name even to himself, in the silence of his head, it was so shameful. Refining his idea, the artist showed between the thighs two breasts with blackened, erect nipples and, between them, what Owen deciphered as the underside of a nose with its two nostrils. The woman was opening herself to be (as older boys said) fucked: that was clear. Why would she do this? That was not clear. Yet it was certain that a woman somewhere had allowed herself to be viewed this way and drawn so that this image could be reproduced here. She had no arms or head and her ankles trailed off without feet; the artist felt that these were inessential. The essential parts of her were depicted, and something stirred below Owen’s belly in acknowledgment that this was true: what mattered most was shown. The slit, the hair, the little dot, and nipples aimed upward like stubby anti-aircraft guns.

  Yet the girls all around him seemed remote from these essentials. They had brown legs from being at the playground all summer, and could run as fast as he. They liked to win at all the games—roof ball and box hockey and Chinese checkers. Ginger Bitting, a girl in his class from Second Street, would hang upside down from the jungle gym, hanging on with only her bent legs while her arms, thin and freckled and with a whitish fuzz, reached down toward the dust, and her long hair, clay-red and fine like the dust, hung down between her arms. If her legs let go she would drop and might break her neck, as did the boy at camp under poor Danny Hoffman’s care. But she never did. Ginger, with her freckles, and her eyes like green glass a light was shining through, was the most daring, the most wiry girl in his class at grade school, the fastest on her feet, the best singer, and the captain of the girls’ team when the boys played them at soccer at recess. If she stole his cap or plaid book bag on the way home from school he could never catch her until she let him. On the playground swing she would kick out and soar; the swing chains would snap and tug and shake the pipe frame, pulling her back from falling as she reached horizontal; still she kicked higher, her brown legs stiff. He watched her feet reach for the sky, in their creased and scuffed leather shoes. Back then, he could wear ankle-high sneakers in summer but girls wore real shoes, with laces and smooth soles.

  The playground was approached from the alley behind Owen’s house, on a path between two cornfields, and then along a kind of grassy road between the baseball bleachers and a row of cherry trees gone wild. Ginger would climb these trees in her slippery shoes, higher than Owen would ever dare. He would watch her as she ascended, but he never saw up her shorts anything like the complicated business drawn on the back of the equipment shed. In the quiet, long-shadowed hour after the playground supervisor and the other children had gone home, and the equipment—the hockey sticks and Ping-Pong paddles and checkerboards—was all locked up, Owen would experiment on the jungle gym, hanging by his arms and bent knees and daring himself to let go with his hands. But he never could. If he fell and broke his neck he would lie there all night, darkness and dew covering him, and be found only in the morning, when the supervisor, bossy, fussy Miss Mull, arrived at nine o’clock to run up the flag on the pole and lead the assembled children in the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Ginger had satellites, though the girls around her perhaps did not think of themselves that way. Each person probably thought of herself, though it was hard to believe, as the center of the universe, just as Owen did. There were a lot of Barbaras—Barbara Emerich, Barbara Jane Gross, Barbara Dolinski—and Alice Stottlemeyer and Georgene King and Carolyn McManus and Grace Bickta, all from Owen’s street or the streets above, who collected on the sidewalks and walked together to elementary school and back. It was Alice Stottlemeyer, shorter than the others and, like Owen, saddled with glasses on her nose, who first kissed him with a secret meaning, a sort of push with her mouth, tight but soft, at a game of spin-the-bottle they were playing at somebody’s birthday party, not Owen’s. His own birthday parties, when his mother gave them, were usually disasters that sent him up the stairs to his room crying, because his guests were having more fun than he, the birthday boy, who had not received exactly the presents he had hoped for. His mother would never allow the game of spin-the-bottle. Their glasses clicked, his and Alice’s, in the little kiss while the other children crowed and jeered and then fell silent, seeing they were kissing seriously, all in a second. Then the bottle spun on, in the center of the ring they made, on the linoleum floor or painted concrete floor of the basement they were in, converted to a den or rumpus room.

  That was one of the many social distinctions that crisscrossed Willow, the one between people who had basements converted into recreation rooms, with panelling and carpeting and easy chairs, and those who, like Owen’s family, the Rausch-Mackenzies, still had cellars, with a sinister bin of filthy coal and cobwebbed shelves of preserves in Mason jars and a spatter-painted old washing machine, tub-shaped and fitted with a wringer of rubber. The wet clothes would emerge from between the two cylinders of white rubber like giant wrinkled tongues and slowly spill into the wicker clothes basket. Owen, when younger even than when Alice Stottlemeyer kissed him, and not yet envious of families with easy chairs and dartboards and electric-train tracks set up on plywood tables in their basements, was enchanted by the plugged-in washing machine’s powerful, rhythmic back-and-forth beating action, stirring up a mass of bubbles, and by the smell of soap flakes, so strong it seemed to scour clean his head and sinuses, and by the woody, springy scent of the wicker basket, with its handles so far apart he could not at first reach both at once. It was inevitable that some day he stick his fingers in the wringer. In a quick rush he felt the relentless pressure climbing toward his wrist, and screamed in terror. It was one of those moments when the hungry chasm beneath the sunny daily surface of things rises up, like the gunshot before dawn, but not as bad; a safety device popped the wringers apart even before his mother could dart around him and reach the release lever. In the way of childhood confusions her alarm, and the look of horror that distended her face there in the barebulbed cellar light, and the scolding she gave him afterwards got lumped with his moment of pain, as if she had caused it. Still, he remained an admirer of the process, the wash travelling through the wringer into the basket and up the cellar stairs through the bulkhead door into the back yard, where the white bedsheets hung about him like the billowing walls of a fragile castle, a jungle palace he was exploring all by himself. A shift of breeze would cause the clothes pole to lean in a different direction, so that his face was brought into abrupt contact with the towering, damp, light-flooded cotton.

>   Handing up clothespins to Momma or Grammy was one of his first ways of being useful. The little clothespin basket had no fresh wicker smell, it was dark from being handled, by women’s hands, year after year, dating back to before Grammy, who had inherited it, a coil of fiber bound into a bowl hard as clay, made of “sweetwater grasses” by slaves or Indians, he didn’t know which. The basket had the musky darkness of the ancient time before cars and movies, radios and light bulbs, long before Owen was born. It was a little heavier and stonier than expected when you touched it, whereas the clothespins were a little lighter. With their two legs and flat knobs at the other end like sailor hats, they were smooth in his hand and could be turned with colored pencils into staring, smiling little men, wearing sailor hats and blue coats. They could be made to do tricks, stuck together like acrobats.

  It was too bad Alice wasn’t prettier and taller, and that, like Owen, she got good marks at school. She was bright, which made her boring. He was drawn to the tough, daredevil girls from families his own looked down on, because of some whispered ancestral taint or scandal or because the father drank or did manual labor or was not nice to the mother. Did this not-niceness take the form of hitting her, or calling her names, or something else, furtive and dirty, that happened? Even in Willow, let alone Alton, there were places, bars and pool halls and bowling alleys, that smelled of misbehavior, of sinful transaction. In the nameless gravel alley that ran beside the hedge of Owen’s yard and then at a right angle behind the asbestos-shingled chicken house his grandfather had built when he first moved to Willow, and then past several garages and small barns at the bottom of people’s yards and a tarpaper shack called a gun shop where a one-eyed man named Smokey Frye noisily pounded and ground metal at odd hours, there was a windowless cinder-block building that a sign above the door identified in hand-painted letters as the Gifford Pinchot Wildlife Society, from which drifted the sounds of men drinking and playing cards. The grown-ups of Willow needed their fun, and for young people there was a recreation hall, the “Rec Hall,” opposite the elementary school, where kids older than Owen danced and played pinball and smoked outside the doors. It was said that a girl two classes ahead of his, Carol Wisniewski, had let herself be fucked by Marty Naftzinger standing up, there in the shadowy, gritty space between the Rec Hall and the factory building beside it, where they made hosiery and then, during the war, parachutes.