Villages

by John Updike

  “How old is she now?” Owen asked, politely.

  “Five, for Chrissakes. Makes you feel ancient.”

  Owen suggested, ironically, “You should have brought her here to the emergency room.”

  Ian didn’t hear irony, unless it was his own. “Naa, basically she’s healthy as a horse. Built like a little brick shithouse. The spitting image of my father, it turns out. He was a stonemason, I’m not ashamed of it.” Stale champagne flavored his breath, exploded bubbles.

  Owen felt a pang, imagining Alissa and the small girl and this flatulent blowhard together, a holy trinity, like his parents and himself on those Sunday walks in Willow. “Well, I hope she feels better,” he told Ian.

  “She’s bound to. Like I say, tough as nails. Both of my grandfathers lived to be ninety.”

  “Tell Alissa we all missed her.” Just Alissa’s name, its kissy sibilance, gave a gentle jolt to Owen’s mind, and the image of a subcutaneously padded back divided by a spine with tender extremities. He had a feeling of comradeship, of consorting with other veterans of the same campaign, as he moved through this crowd, his fellow townsfolk for fifteen years, a loving and loved feeling that bounced back not just from the women he knew but from the downtown merchants in their slippery polyester suits, the jeweller and the liquor-store owner, the surefooted roofer doubling as bartender at a white-covered table, and the sturdy nurse, now retired, who eight years ago, when Owen had his appendix removed, would bestow upon him the mercy of more Demerol in the dead of the night. Hospital orderlies and receptionists brought some brown and olive faces to this festive throng. He couldn’t find Phyllis in it, though her fair head usually floated a few inches above most others. He had loved her, initially, for being tall, tall and female and young. Her curious apparent absence gave him a premonitory stab of guilt; he felt unworthy of his happiness, confused by it. This guilty bliss is life?

  Shadows were lengthening. The air was turning chilly. Vanessa, who as co-chairperson had already given an efficient speech of many-sided thanks into a defective, squawking portable sound system, came up to him. She wore a teal-green shot-silk pants suit and had at her side a handsome man in a reversed collar. “Owen dear, I’m not sure you’ve met the Reverend Mister Arthur Larson. He’s rather new at Epiphany Episcopal but was a splendid help with the special contributors in his flock. He helped us pin them down.”

  The clergyman shook Owen’s hand. His grip would be, Owen intuited, exquisitely adjusted to the gender and size of the gripped, to his or her economic significance in the town, and to the strength of the presumed friendship with influential Vanessa. Owen received a warm but not fervent squeeze. Reverend Larson’s handsomeness seemed something evenly sprayed on, a water-resistant layer of it, from the satin shine on his narrow black shoes to the leathery lustre of his wind-buffed face, that of a weekday outdoorsman. The shirt beneath his collar was not the usual sooty black but a suave dove-gray; the thick hair on his head reminded Owen, in its resilience and tightly matted knit, of some middle-sized, tufty-backed, curly-tailed dog. Larson was still in his thirties, and firm but unassuming in demeanor. This was a man whose way was secure within the Lord’s way.

  “Owen,” he said, repeating the name from Vanessa’s introduction, as if fixing it to a roll of remembrance in his mind. His eyes were kindly glints bracketed by the beginnings of creases. Owen liked him; he liked most clergy, for holding off the unthinkable while we dally through life.

  Larson moved a half-step to the side, revealing a woman with him, who had tactfully lagged behind, on the other side from Vanessa. She was compact and silken, like Elsie, with a touch of double chin, but also radiated the inscrutable, somewhat humorless vitality Owen had last admired in Ginger Bitting. Her handshake startled him, those fine female fingers coolly sliding into his palm. Her eyes were the sharp aquamarine of, in Willow, the tinted wineglasses and scallop-edged little glass candy dishes that houseproud aunts and elderly female neighbors would set on the locked upper edge of the lower window sash to catch the light. In his schooled and preening baritone, dipping a bit deeper into his chest than mere communication demanded, the other man announced to Owen, “And this is my good wife, Julia.”

  xiii. You Don’t Want to Know

  In Haskells Crossing, people die. They show you how to do it. They do it out of sight, among professional nurses and faithful retainers usually, though in rare instances they drop dead without warning while, say, pushing up the hill on the thirteenth hole, or in the middle of a nap after a boozy Sunday lunch. Death never loses its quality of unexpectedness. Life does not expect it; the living mind cannot conceive of it. Some citizens die soon after elaborate cosmetic surgery, or a difficult multiple-bypass operation, or an expensive house renovation, preparing for the years ahead; they die regardless.

  In church, which Owen and Julia attend regularly, though for her less regularly than when she was a clergyman’s wife, the process can be seen at work. The dying, Sunday after Sunday, are by increments more hesitant and emaciated as they totter back from the communion rail with defiant eyes and munching jaws. Next, they can no longer make it to the communion rail, or cannot kneel, because of a dropsical knee or an excruciating hip, and take the wafer into their lips standing up, like Roman Catholics or Lutherans, or else—the next stage—the minister and his acolyte bring it to them afterwards in the pews. At this break in the customary ceremony there is no other sound than that of the minister murmuring, no other motion than that of the communicant’s shaky white head bobbing and her hand, if she is of the old high-church school, making the sign of the cross after receiving the wafer and wine. The men lose color in their faces, turning a stony gray as their eyes sink in the sockets; the women, who even in life’s last stages can draw upon the fleshy tints of makeup, show a glittering gaze above withered but ruddy cheeks. Dying flatters some women, highlighting the austerity and doughtiness that were always theirs. Others, like remarkably rich Florence Sprang, appear as painted, overdressed grotesques hobbling up the aisle between a cane and a retainer to receive their portion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

  Finally, even the most stoic and determined communicant cannot make it to Sunday service and is present there only as a name in the Prayers of the People, as one of the many—too many, it is whispered—names read in a flat voice by the day’s leader, after the formula For the aged and infirm, for the widowed and orphans, and for the sick and the suffering, let us pray to the Lord. Or, in Form III, Have compassion on those who suffer from any grief or trouble. In the drone of names that follows, “Florence” democratically mingles with a host of ailing and imperilled others, Erin and Jameeka, Shonda and Lara, Dolores and Jade, Bruce and Hamad and Todd, who, though never met by her, are included in Epiphany’s outreach program in downtown Cabot City as they suffer, in shelters and subsidized apartments, the ruinous effects of drugs and alcohol, obesity and AIDS, promiscuity and bipolar disorder. Next, Florence’s name, its surname restored, figures for a time in the list following the rote words For those who have died in the hope of the resurrection, and for all the departed, let us pray to the Lord. The congregation responds, in entreaty to the huge hypothetical entity that hangs over these village proceedings, Lord, have mercy, or, of the departed, secure in their coffins and urns, Let light perpetual shine upon them.

  Light perpetual, in a universe where, the latest scientific reports indicate, expansion, propelled by some unknown factor called the dark force, is accelerating to the point where the stars will eventually be invisible to one another. By other proven laws they will burn out and drift as meaningless ash-heaps of forever inert matter. No one follows the latest turns of empirical cosmology more keenly than the village clergyman, hoping for some peep, around a cryptic equation’s corner, of divine mercy. One of the burdens, as Owen sees it, that the modern faithful shoulder is the monstrously enlarged context of time. Saint Paul thought the last trumpet would sound within the lifetime of some living—“Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all
sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump”—and medieval men could still picture their intact skeletons clambering up, gumlessly grinning, out of their graves. The next world was around the corner, almost visitable, like the vaults beneath the cathedral floor. Now it must be relegated to another dimension, joining those subatomic strings whose mathematical invention may at last solve the riddle of existence: why did nothingness, the ground note of cosmic reality, the substratum that everlastingly endures, choose so troublesomely to violate itself and give birth to anything at all? The church in strategic retreat abandons the cosmos to physics, and takes refuge in the personal—the cosmos of fragile, evanescent consciousness. In that shadow-world, infinitely prolonged, Florence and Jameeka and Lara and Bruce consort, bathed in God’s indiscriminate love, and together mount from strength to strength. If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die. In the next verse, Paul ominously adds, Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

  Owen and Julia, as it happened, befriended mostly older people when they moved to Haskells Crossing. Couples their own age, discovering that this polite middle-aged couple did not drink or know any local gossip, tended not to have them back after the first invitation to cocktails. The elderly, though, having arrived by way of illness or AA at their own renunciations, found the new “young” couple fresh and mannerly, and had them to seasonal parties where Owen and Julia were, save for grandchildren underfoot, the youngest guests present. In the cheerful crowd of these elders, jubilantly full of obsolescent lore, the great harvester was already active. Funerals became a familiar occasion—the Episcopal rite, stretched to accommodate informal, sometimes irreverent and hilarious, reminiscences by old friends and aging offspring. There would be a service leaflet, with anodyne verses on the back and in the middle the hymn numbers and prayers and on the front a fascinating photograph of the deceased in the fullness of life, at the tiller of his boat in Maine, or posed by a laden rose trellis, laughing in a sunshine whose neutrinos have reached the star Vega by now, or holding the bridle of a horse, itself deceased, displaying a wild eye and flaring brute nostril. Owen was fascinated by what constituted, for the rich, their happiest, summary moments. Country pleasures: millions of dollars organized into a quest for purity, for aboriginal innocence. Rarely was an indoor photo chosen, or one snapped in the course of a workday or a ceremony, a fortieth anniversary or a sumptuous retirement party. If the image was taken from the smooth-skinned youth of the recently dead, it was almost always in a sporting pose—in whites beside a tennis net, or holding a silver trophy with a smile no less bright. The afterlife, the implication was, would be a country club. After the service, the widow or widower or oldest child still in this locality would host a party, at the spacious former home or at the yacht club or the country club, where remembrance of the departed yielded to forgetful gaiety and bitter complaint of how the land-owning, tax-paying residents of Haskells Crossing were disadvantaged in their struggles with those corrupt, or just careless, and in any case petty politicians ensconced in the power chambers of Cabot City. The party, if this was a private home, would have in its view a sparkling slice of the sea, that omnivorous imperturbable image of the eternity that awaits each celebrant, each survivor.

  One of the earliest acquaintances of the new Mackenzies—Mackenzies II, if marriages were movies, or, if computer programs, Mackenzies 2.1—had been Bumpy Wentworth, a small plump woman with thinning blue hair and a gift for mimicry. She had been called Bumpy in her girlhood, by an aggrieved younger brother with whom she was sharing, along with a substantial governess, the back seat of their father’s Peerless. Photographs from 1925, when she was ten, do attest to a pugnacious sisterly heft. She became a benign, comfortably proportioned woman, but the name travelled with her out from the nuclear family into day school, boarding school, finishing school, and marriage. In the conservative fashion of the region, where a genial male chauvinism labelled the tribal females like pets, “Bumpy,” with its connotation of “bumptious,” stuck. So did, among her peers in Haskells Crossing, the designations Muffin, Jonesie, Snuggles, and Bunch: these were all dignified women of means in their sixties or seventies.

  Now, if Julia had any weakness, it was for light-hearted female friendship. She had been passed from her father, a New Haven banker and high churchman whose three other offspring were boys, straight to her husband, fresh from divinity school, as an exemplary woman: from model daughter and student into perfect helpmeet and homemaker without a break. The one slip of her life had been falling in love with Owen, which she later construed as rescuing him from a desperately immoral life. He was ready to be rescued, but she was not ready to be at the center of a scandal, and to be shunned not only by her husband’s horrified parishioners but by, with ostentatious indignation, respectable women of Middle Falls like Vanessa Slade, Imogene Bisbee, Trish Oglethorpe, and Alissa Morrissey. So it was a joyful relief for Julia to fall in, a hundred miles to the northeast, with the likes of dithery, slyly witty Bunch Hapgood, gaunt, gentle Jonesie Wilkins, and kindly, sensible Bumpy Wentworth; over sherry, the younger woman would laugh until tears blinded her at their imitations, with appropriate accents, of Irish maids and Italian gardeners in Father’s employ and even of the dear late husband’s stuffy, miserly Wasp business partners. Julia was virtually a girl to them, and Mrs. Wentworth saw to it that she, with Owen trailing along, met the right people and, in time, joined the right clubs. As the New England seasons picturesquely lumbered through Haskells Crossing, and the troubles of the Mackenzies’ half-dozen children—four of his, two of hers—were confided and then soothed and chuckled away over tea, and funeral after funeral put mutual acquaintances to rest, Bumpy was always there. In her mid-eighties, she visibly began to lose weight and to weaken; alopecia obliged her to wear a wig, about which she was very droll, debating with Julia whether peach or apricot would be the most tasteful shade. Even when taken to the hospital with breathing difficulties, the old woman had been merry; at Julia’s last visit, Bumpy got her to giggling unstoppably at the comic side of a tea-pot tempest in the altar guild, which Julia, one of the guild’s mainstays, had been taking too seriously. As light faded in the hospital windows, she sank back on her pillow and patted Julia’s hand with her withered own. She promised her that she was liking her new medicine and was going to get her strength back in rehab on the other side of Cabot City. She had been depressed but could feel her good spirits returning.

  So it was in the aggrieved, incredulous voice of a child who has been tricked that Julia, replacing the receiver after a phone call early the next morning, came back to the bedroom and announced to Owen, “Bumpy died!” Tears stood out in her eyes, making their aquamarine more vivid. Julia was a woman who even in the worst of times didn’t cry.

  Middle Falls had seen other scandals and breakups, but this was of a novel order, a clergyman’s wife and a coolly arranged double split. Owen’s second son and third child, fifteen-year-old Floyd, named after his grandfather the accountant, brought home from school the news that Reverend Larson and his wife, of all people, were splitting up. Jennifer Pajasek, a girl in his grade who sometimes babysat for them, said they’d been fighting a lot and the children—a girl and a boy—were very upset.

  Floyd could not see, as he relayed this news to his father in a voice of puzzled, titillated innocence, that it was news about himself, the first crack of a doom about to descend on his own head. In a parsonage two miles away, events had been set in motion. Owen had been drawn into that pit of fatality whose rim had been marked so many years ago by the sound of Danny Hoffman pulling the trigger of his father’s Army-issue Colt .38 before dawn, two houses up Mifflin Avenue. Now this was at four-thirty in the afternoon, on a bright September day at the kitchen table in the six-bedroom, four-bathroom Mackenzie house on Partridgeberry Road, but the realm was the same, the realm of irrevocable real
harm. He was his own child’s executioner. The gun was still hidden behind his back but in a few days would have to be taken out and fired. His son would become, like Buddy Rourke, fatherless, his father having strayed. Phyllis already knew. The town would soon know. There was no hiding, no going back. Beyond the kitchen windows, blameless life sounded its songs, as detached from human guilt as a dream—starlings clattering as they gathered in flocks for migration, insects invisibly stridulating as the summer wound up its business.

  Julia led the way—the first to spill the beans, the first to separate, the first to divorce. Though Owen desired her, and saw in her his chance to settle safely into married concupiscence and obedience, he might have lagged indefinitely, keeping women in the air like a juggler’s gaudy balls, had she not shamed him out of it. Shock at her own fall had galvanized her; the doubt-free momentum acquired when she had been virtuous carried her along. She never looked back, and he weakly followed.

  The announcements to his children, the move to an apartment in the slummy row houses across the river from the old mill, the interview with a jaded, non-judgmental Hartford divorce lawyer—these all had an underwater quality. He moved numbly through a thickness of others’ pain, scarcely recognizing himself. In this thicker element, he felt oddly light. There was a sensation that, in entering the drastic element—the fatality he confused with the vacant lot next to his first home, where his glasses in their dew-soaked case had been miraculously returned to him, convincing him that his life was charmed—Owen had begun his delayed adulthood. Leaving Phyllis in their mid-forties was the first adult action of his life. To be an adult is to be a killer. Pacifists and non-combatants are just fooling themselves, letting others do the dirty work.