Villages

by John Updike

  Unlike his mother, Grandpa Rausch had not been too present, nor had he been, like Owen’s father, too absent. He had been just right, sitting quiet in the center of the caneback sofa while Owen played on the living-room carpet with his Tinker Toys and lead warplanes, or made the Lionel train go around and around, backwards and forwards, the little black transformer box overheating to emit a slight, cozy stink of burning, like his mother when she ironed. She also emitted this smell when, sitting at her dresser, she used the long-nosed curling iron on her auburn hair. His mother was hot, hot like the top of the coal-burning kitchen stove, dangerous to touch, though she warmed the kitchen, and the whole house for that matter. She had a redhead’s temper, what his father called “a short fuse”; her hand would flash out and slap Owen’s face quicker than he could duck. All his life Owen wanted women to be cool and calm except when he (more and more rarely) desired them otherwise.

  “Talk about the news, the economy,” Julia advises him. “Whether or not we should go to war with Iraq again.”

  “Another thing that happens at seventy—thank God, darling, you’re too young to have it happen to you—is you cease to care about the news. It isn’t new. Didn’t we do Iraq a Bush or so ago?”

  “Talk about golf. You love golf.”

  “But not golfers necessarily. It’s pathetic, it’s all we can talk about, you can see the wives start to fidget and move away. The wives didn’t use to get so bored in Middle Falls, I wonder what we talked about.”

  “You talked about how you wanted to fuck them, without exactly saying so.”

  “Oh, surely not.”

  “I was there.”

  “Bless you for that. Right there, playing the game with the best of them.” She doesn’t like to be reminded of that. To mollify his stab, he asks, in a child’s whine, “What am I going to do between now and the Achesons?” Owen used to work in every spare minute; he developed his first marketable program, DigitEyes, using a clumsy mix of machine code and the early version of FORTRAN he had learned at IBM, in a garage behind the clapboarded semi-detached he and Phyllis had rented on Common Lane for their first year and a half in Middle Falls. In Haskells Crossing, his garage, much larger than that historic one, is taken up with three cars and with lawn equipment he never touches, as well as cartons and cartons of prep-school and college texts abandoned by their combined children by previous marriages.

  “Go to the club and play golf,” Julia suggests. “Or help me weed the hosta and cut back the ivy. It all looks like shit.” She has a genteel manner but a salty tongue.

  Owen misses the old Willow playground, its plateau long bulldozed out of existence. Time hung heavy there, but the weight was delicious, as he moved the marbles of Chinese checkers from one triangle to another, and braided rickrack lanyards for whistles though only Miss Mull had any need to wear one, and retrieved the roof ball from the cornfields when it went over the pavilion’s tarpaper roof, and watched Ginger dangle from the monkey bars or kick high, higher on the creaking swing. He realizes that to the children of Haskells Crossing the country club is their playground, with its pool and snack bar and tetherball and clay tennis courts, and probably with dirty drawings scratched somewhere where grown-ups never think to look, but for Owen this recreational space wears a stupefying glaze of propriety, of that hopeless boringness special to the rich. The poor know boredom but always hope that things will change for the better, whereas the rich simply want things to go on just as they are, which is even less likely to happen. Their problems—the constant crisis state of their golf games, the huge new house some nouveau riche from out of state was putting up right in their ocean view, the impossibility of finding dependable help in the house and garden (even the Brazilians and Albanians are overcharging and learning how to loaf), the unshakable slump in the stock market, the rising real-estate taxes, the adult children who are getting divorces and having disappointing, quixotic careers in the arts or bleeding-heart social work—strike Owen as trivial, compared with the do-or-die problems that afflicted his childhood household and from which he had been sheltered.

  As the slate roof of the house on Mifflin Avenue withstood rain and the hurricane of ’38, so his guardians had shielded him from a pelting hail of worries: poverty with no federal safety net, ill health with no post-war medical miracles, loss of social face with no forgiveness in the social system. The child gathered ominous bits of conversation from other rooms in the house: his father’s job was none too secure, the local hosiery industry was a lost cause, his mother’s health was uncertain. She had high blood pressure and female complaints. Beyond the drawing on the playground shed, Owen knew nothing about the female sexual organs, but from what he overheard he gathered they were a one-way street to medical disaster. And Grandpa and Grammy were far from young; they rustled in their room, with its wet-paper smell of old bodies, on the edge of oblivion, and beat the odds by appearing each morning for breakfast. Owen made his way through the days, rising steadily through the grades at school, grateful that his world on Mifflin Avenue stayed intact.

  Then, when he was thirteen, it didn’t. The mill where his father worked closed down. Its war work had been its last gasp. His father walked the baking summer streets of Alton looking for an accountant’s job. The humiliation of it wore his face thin and tinted it yellow. He became obsessed—absurdly, thought Owen, who never saw the bills—with the expense of the Mifflin Avenue house, the heating, the maintenance, the need for fresh paint. It had become in his mind another “rip-off joint.” He called it “Pop’s folly”; he had to get out from under it. The house, the only house Owen had ever lived in, was sold, for the very same amount, eight thousand five hundred dollars, for which Owen’s grandfather had bought it twenty-five years ago, in the wake of another world war. For half that amount they bought a house in the country, miles from anywhere, surrounded by eroding fields and the buzz of crickets and the scolding of birds. The little stone house had stood empty for a year. Swifts had built nests in the chimney; flying squirrels lived in the attic; feral cats hid in the old bales of hay in the unpainted barn. There was no electricity, no telephone, no plumbing, and putting in these things took much of their leftover four thousand dollars. Also, they had to have a car; in Willow they could walk everywhere, the five of them in five different directions if they wanted, and for seven cents the trolley car took them right into Alton, with its department stores and movie palaces. Daddy could not find a job in Alton. The entire city was slowly dying, and he, over forty, was too old to retrain. A college classmate in Norristown, toward Philadelphia, finally took him on, as an associate in his accounting firm, for less money than the hosiery mill had paid, and this took the car away from eight in the morning to six at night. Owen was left with his grandparents, his mother, a barnful of cats with runny eyes, and two fluffy collie puppies. The nearest neighbors were Mennonites, whose children had no time for play; they all worked on their farm. A mile away was an old tavern and a grocery store in a cluster of six houses along the road, but this was no kind of village. Owen stayed in the house and read science fiction and mystery novels set in English villages and dreamed of farfetched inventions that would make him rich. His retrospective image of his life tended to delete those years; they had no place on his résumé, the six rural years before he went away to MIT and New England.

  The village he now lives in, his last village most likely save for the Bide-a-Wee Terminal Care Complex, has no government of its own; it is a precinct of a city of forty thousand, Cabot City. Haskells Crossing is the old summer-estate section, where the acreages of Pittsburgh and Chicago millionaires—billionaires in today’s money—have been broken into smaller holdings but are still remembered, still felt as a foundation layer of comfort and spaciousness. The great plutocrats, with their yachts and private docks and miles of granite wall and flaring stone staircases leading up to long swimming pools and neo-classic changing rooms and red-clay tennis courts and fanciful gazebos, left a certain aura as well as children who, themsel
ves now nearing extinction, remember coming east from Chicago or Cleveland every June in Daddy’s private railroad car. A century before, as the B & M tracks came out from Boston along the North Shore, the crossing took its name from a local salt-water farmer, Enoch Haskell, who had been bought out; his weathered wooden buildings were knocked down and burned and his struggling fields turned into emerald lawns, but his name has outlasted those of those who ousted him. The South Shore lost its commuter lines after the war, but in this direction they hung on, and once an hour a passing train makes the granite bedrock underlying Owen and Julia’s house slightly but perceptibly tremble. He likes this elemental touch, this tangible connection between transport and geology.

  There is a small downtown—the fire station, the war memorial, the French baker, a branch bank, a 7-Eleven, a fruit store, a health-food store, a drugstore eventually driven out of business by competition from the mall CVSs and Walgreens, a bookstore always on the verge of being extinguished by the Borders and the Barnes & Noble in the mall ten miles distant, a pizza parlor, a dry cleaner’s, two competing hairdressers both from the tropics (Costa Rica, the Philippines), a failing florist beside a vacant office that had housed a travel agency fatally undermined by the World Trade Center disaster and subsequent airline economics, a family restaurant, and a twice-as-expensive restaurant for courting couples and the local well-to-do when they have guests to impress. There is even a Haskells Crossing post office, from the days when the estate owners were deemed as deserving of one, at least, as a Nebraska whistle-stop.

  But the ghostly center of power, which in Willow had been gathered at the five-cornered intersection, here hovers three miles and many railroad crossings away, at the city hall and adjoining police station, in the center of Cabot City. Once a riverside hamlet named Colchester after the home town of the early Puritan settlers, it was renamed in honor of the creator of the river-polluting leatherworks that, with its sister factories, populated the close-packed streets of triple-deckers with Polish, Greek, Irish, and even Turkish millworkers. The mills have folded, but the descendants of the workers continue to support city administrations notorious, in the precinct of Haskells Crossing, for high assessments and corruptible zoning regulations. Haskells Crossing in 1880 attempted to secede and join the adjacent summer colony, Haven-by-the-Sea, but the move was thwarted on Beacon Hill, not by the Irish legislature but by the veto of the Boston Brahmin governor, who according to some had been influenced by an undeclared donation of leather money and according to others by a high-minded conservative resistance, in the wake of the Civil War, to revolts and remap-pings of any kind.

  Owen, like his neighbors, likes Haskells Crossing the way it is. Self-governed Haven-by-the-Sea, with its town meetings and hotly debated tax overrides, seems a village too pleased with itself, too busily inturned. The distant Cabot City officialdom leaves him, save financially, untouched. Water, rusty but drinkable, pushes up his hill from a city reservoir; trash is collected at the foot of his driveway once a week. A policeman, the one time he and Julia reported a robbery, appeared the same day, looking baffled but sympathetic, with glistening oval eyes. He looked like a big squirrel without a bushy tail, hunched over his notebook nearsightedly nibbling at every acorn of a clue. The thief was never found.

  Owen, raised in a village idyllically becalmed by hard times, in a nation steadfastly abjuring the quick fixes of fascism and communism, holds a mixed bag of socio-economic attitudes: he votes Democrat, because his parents and grandparents had voted for Roosevelt, but at the same time he expects so little from government that all social services and signs of public order pleasantly surprise him. When Bradley Acheson bemoans to him, on the broad sunlit lawn of the day’s cocktail party, the latest attempt to subdivide and develop the old Judson estate’s sixty-five acres, Owen’s tongue is tied, undecided between agreeing, for the sake of the green spaces that old wealth once kept open and that only government intervention can sustain, and pointing out that the North American continent’s history has been one of development. “Housing starts,” he finally, haltingly says, “are a leading economic indicator, and isn’t crying ‘Nimby’ somewhat anti-democratic, even anti-patriotic under your great guy Bush Two?”

  “Nimby?”

  “Not in My Back Yard.”

  Brad has evidently not heard the acronym before, and his bark of laughter hurls a bit of devilled egg at the lapel of Owen’s blazer. Owen doesn’t flinch, and courteously waits while his host’s large, square face—itself a space that invites development—chews through the uncongenial complexity, the sterile conflictedness, of his guest’s reply. “The developer,” Brad complains, “isn’t even from Massachusetts—it’s some California megafirm that comes in and knocks down every tree and puts up this horrendous spread of McMansions, jammed in as tight as the zoning allows. We’ll wind up looking like Watertown.”

  “Sounds horrible, Brad, but, hey, it creates jobs, jobs in one of the few American industries they can’t take overseas. Listen: every town in this country was once a farm or a forest. If you right-wing tree-huggers had been in charge, nothing would ever have been built. Cabot City would still be a river full of fish. Haven-by-the-Sea would be Nothing-by-the-Sea. It would be a heap of clamshells beside some rotting wigwams.”

  Brad presses his lips together and looks as if he might sputter; he squints over Owen’s shoulder to see what other of his guests need attending, what pleasanter conversations he might join. “There has to be a balance,” he finally decides.

  “Exactly,” Owen agrees. He loves Brad, as a golfer. When he looks at him he sees not his soul, as God is said to, nor the statistics of his income and net worth, as the tax authorities hope to discern, but a certain swing, a kind of twirling motion with the fingers held too near the end of the grip, a dainty yet determined swing which, on good days, delivers drives down the middle, sometimes sneaky long, and tosses up chips that creep marvellously close to the hole. The men of Owen’s acquaintance in Haskells Crossing and its environs are to him an array of golf swings, no two alike: staid Morton Burnham a powerful but too-upright lunge with an ineradicable head-bob; loose-jointed Geoffrey Dillingham an exaggerated shoulder-turn, the club flung back way past parallel; stout Quentin Chute a trigger-quick hand-punch, all forearms and grimace; fussy Martin Scofield an agitated, overintellectual set-up, the feet shuffling to widen and narrow, close and open the stance while the club is insecurely gripped and regripped, a mis-hit increasingly certain; serious-minded Gavin Rust a rather comical last-second squat, after a series of solemn waggles with locked knees; careful Caleb Eppes a superslow take-back, like the Tin Man after a night of rain; excitable Corey Cogswell an incorrigible look-up and a subsequent hail of curses upon himself, with an aborted club-toss; and so on. Owen’s male friends are ninety percent swings to him; he knows almost nothing of their professional activities, or the religious convictions that frame their sense of well-being, or the erotic adventures that have brought them to their present domestic situations. Most, in fact, are still married to the girls they had married in the ’fifties. Most have a sinusoid New England accent and the playful regional reticence, perfected through generations of close dealing, as New England’s proportional share of the national wealth dwindled. Owen’s ignorance of these natives, however, is partly willful; their seeming blankness is something within him, a lockout of input. He is not interested in them because, as Julia has pointed out, he does not covet their wives. Their wives are twittering biddies, haggard rasping former debutantes, perky, mannerly, and as finely fitted to this society as the parts of a well-milled machine. In Middle Falls, on the outer rim of a greater metropolitan area, none of the women had quite fit; all wanted something different, though it was hard to say what, hard even for them. A widespread discontent had filled the town with an erratic, rueful energy not unlike that of Owen’s mother. He had grown up breathing an atmosphere on the edge of blow-up; female revolt, rumbling in the romantic comedies showing at the Scheherazade, threatened the peace of h
is grandfather’s house. While his fiery-haired mother had lacked the resources for striking out toward freedom, the women of the ’sixties and ’seventies were less constrained. Fresh on the Pill, barred by early marriage and motherhood from the wild party—love-beads and bell-bottoms, crash pads and rock concerts, acid and pot—that they could hear on the other side of the generational wall, the women of Middle Falls were restless, wry, and lovable.

  In Haskells Crossing, it is Julia who loves the women. She finds reality and comfort in their company—at bridge, on committees, in the seasonal cycle of parties all catered with the same six hors d’oeuvres by the same dignified family firm. Julia fits in, so snugly that Owen feels like a spare part. He is the husband, a figment to be evoked when she deals with male plumbers, carpenters, tree surgeons, lawn caregivers. “They resent dealing with women,” she confesses, “so I say you say this and that, and they perk right up.” In her feminine coffee-klatches, husbands are described as balky appliances, comically absent-minded and inept. Feminism has brought with it a cheerful misandry. Male refusal to ask questions when lost, male blindness to the most glaring facts of decor and dress, male inability to distinguish zinnias from phlox, or the refrigerator from the broom closet, male clumsiness at the simplest home tasks, and even, when the vermouth had been flowing, male sexual demands, so impatient, primitive, and lacking in stamina—these are merrily mocked. The genteel social surface of Haskells Crossing is gender-riven, and Julia likes it that way. That a married couple share a bed as well as a bank account is assumed but made little of. Husbands, who at meaner economic levels generate dependency and fear by rages and beatings, are here tamed by the impossible cost, in an old age rich in jointly owned savings and equities and real estate, of divorce. Husbands are superfluous, dutiful adjuncts to the busy interaction of women. Owen has no trouble accepting such a role, since his own father had struck him as similarly pathetic and unnecessary.